Ace Combat: Skyward Horizon
by Chris Ganale
Summary: A feared enemy ace pilot. The leader of an elite US Air Force fighter squadron. War forces them together as enemies, but fate has other plans in store. In one corner of the universe, there's nothing so annoying as a misfile...
1. Nightmare

_December 17, 20XX  
__United States Airspace over Boston, Massachusetts  
__1015 hours, local time_

"_Magic to Misfile Leader,"_ the filtered voice of the combat airspace controller echoed in her ears. _"Bogeys are confirmed hostile on a direct course to Boston. You are clear to engage and destroy."_

Colonel Emily McArthur, one of the few and most noted female combat pilot in the US Air Force, reached up her left hand and lowered the polarized visor of her helmet over her eyes, responding to Magic's update with, "Confirmed, Magic. Misfile Flight engaging. Three, Four, go have a party. Two, on me."

"_Roger that, One,"_ Three responded, his F-22A Raptor, the pinnacle of American fighter technology, banking away from the formation to engage enemies in a separate area. Misfile Four's Raptor followed.

"_Misfile One, Misfile One,"_ the voice of her wingman called, even as she looked down at her radar display to track enemy and allied aircraft movement and select her target. _"Tally bogey at one o'clock."_

Looking out her canopy, she spotted the bogey her wingman had picked out, a Russian Su-27 arcing toward the downtown area of Boston. Given its unhurried movements, it wasn't yet aware of them. A fatal mistake. Boosting her throttle, she listened to the building roar of her engines, muffled by the canopy and the aircraft frame, as she sailed in behind the enemy jet. "He's mine, Missi."

"_I got your back, boss,"_ and indeed she did. A bare glance at her radar screen showed Captain Missi Fuller's F-22A tuck in behind and to the right of her own jet, prepared to cover her should her target slip her, or another enemy angle in after her.

The enemy pilot was nothing if not quick on the uptake. With the distance between their two jets, the AIM-9M Sidewinder she launched should have traversed the distance instantaneously and taken the enemy pilot out, but his immediate reaction to the missile lock allowed him to dump flares to draw off the missile and cut hard toward the cityscape.

Emily glanced toward the skyscrapers looming up on all sides of them, then grinned as she refocused her attention on the Russian plane. "Want to play tag?" she murmured to herself, not transmitting over the radio. "Let's play. I can match any move you pull in that old crate."

It was as much a statement of fact as it was a boast of her own skill. The Su-27, first appearing in 1977, was a fourth-generation jet fighter, its counterpart being the American F-15 Eagle. The F-22A, on the other hand, was a fifth-generation plane, first appearing in 1997, and featured numerous design upgrades that the Russian jet lacked, first and foremost a two-dimensional thrust vectoring engine design that altered the direction of the exhaust, allowing for a much tighter turning performance. But as she knew well, pilot skill could more than make up the difference in aircraft specs.

Feathering her throttle forward, she closed the distance on the Russian pilot, moving toward guns range. Surrounded by buildings full of civilians, she wasn't willing to risk a missile shot that he might evade and cause to hit a skyscraper-

Almost as if underscoring her thoughts, a missile shot past her fighter and slammed into the corner of a skyscraper she was about to pass, blasting a significant chunk of the facade out of its side and sending the debris into her path. Her breath catching in her throat, she stamped down on the right rudder pedal and twitched her stick to the right, rolling her plane out of the way while keeping her nose oriented on the enemy pilot. Even as she shot past the building, her gaze was drawn back toward it, heart pounding in her chest. Who the hell fired that missile? Did they even know how many innocent people they'd just killed!

"_Boss, building!"_ Missi's voice warned her, and she looked back front just in time to see that she was about to plaster herself into the roof of another building. Releasing the rudder pedal, she shoved her stick in the other direction, rolling her fighter onto its left wing, and pulled back to arc around the right side of the building. Once clear, she leveled back out and resumed pursuit, breathing harshly as she closed in again. She had no idea how close she'd come to scraping her vertical stabilizers on that building, and she didn't want to know. Missi was going to give her hell for her close calls later.

The Russian jet had slowed up marginally from its breakneck speed; it clearly had seen her going toward that building and had expected her to plow into it. A burst of 20mm high-explosive incendiary rounds chewing into his right engine and vertical stabilizer broke him of that notion. With smoke and flame trailing from the engine, his fighter slewed slightly before he punched back up to the fastest speed he could attain. She kept on him, feathering bursts of gunfire to spook him while being mindful of the damage she could do with stray fire.

Following him as he roared over an interstate highway that ran through the middle of the city, over the top of a parking garage, he cut in dangerously close to a glass-walled banking building before pulling away again, clearly trying to get her to paste herself into the building. It was a desperation move, because once she'd easily avoided the building, he had no more skyscrapers to hide himself in.

With mercy a quality temporarily absent in her mind, Emily watched a targeting reticle settle over the fighter in her helmet-oriented heads-up display and burn red, indicating a lock-on. "Fox Two," she announced, depressing the fire button beneath her thumb.

As the missile shot off on a plume of smoke, she kept on the enemy, ready to jump in and finish it with guns if it evaded again. It certainly tried to, cutting hard to the right while leaving a glimmering trail of burning red flares in its wake, but the missile was not fooled, streaking on an intercept course that left it slightly ahead of the enemy fighter. Once its sensor package detected proximity, the missile detonated, filling the sky around it with a shrapnel haze that the enemy flew directly into. The shrapnel obliterated the control surfaces of the Su-27 with the same ferocity of a shotgun blast hitting a newspaper. Out of control, its pilot probably dead, the enemy fighter spun toward the ground below.

"_Misfile, bandits are heading toward the stadium,"_ Magic alerted, just as another pair of fighters shot across her forward arc from left to right.

Immediately, she rolled onto her right wing to pursue, angling toward the leftmost of the two planes. "Missi, take his friend."

"_On him, One,"_ the younger pilot responded, the radar screen showing her jet gaining separation.

Emily took little time to lock onto this target, sending another Sidewinder toward his engines. This pilot was a little braver or a little more experienced than the last, waiting until the last second to dump flares before gaining altitude and banking to the right. The Sidewinder exploded in the midst of the flares, some of the shrapnel biting into the enemy's engines. As he trailed smoke, she closed in to finish with guns, and didn't realize he had lost control of his plane until he plowed into the scoreboard of the stadium.

The explosion pitched parts of the scoreboard into the sky, and Emily knew some had been sucked into her intake when she heard the dreaded screeching beneath her and a shudder ran through her entire aircraft's frame. Praying beneath her breath, she fought her stick to regain control of the aircraft, concerned right now with keeping herself from faceplanting into the city. A glance behind her showed black smoke trailing from her engines.

"_Colonel?"_ Missi's voice called over the radio, concern clear in her tone. Her wingman fell back into place behind her, keeping pace as she tried to recover her jet.

She looked down at her diagnostics. Miraculously, the engines weren't glowing red to indicate massive damage, but the stick was still having trouble responding. "I took some shrapnel. Engines seem good but the stick feels a bit sluggish."

It wasn't until that report of not being in immediate danger of death that Missi barked out a laugh and responded, _"Shrapnel? You ate half a scoreboard!"_

Despite herself, Emily laughed as well, then shook her head and continued, "I'm going to run a flight check. Watch my rudder."

"_Eyes on you, boss."_

"Turning," she announced, tugging her stick to the left and then pulling back. The world around her rotated, and the jet didn't respond as quickly as she would have liked, but at least it didn't fall out of the sky. Leveling back out, she repeated the maneuver to the right, and it responded a little better. She went back and forth a few more times until it was responding to her liking. Not perfect, but close enough.

"_Magic, this is Shooter One,"_ she heard over the radio while running her checks. _"I've sighted our downed airman but be advised, there's a major fire in the area."_

"Ascending," she alerted Missi, leveling off and pulling up on her stick. The nose of the jet lifted with only a slight wobble, and she held it for a few moments before leveling off.

"_Magic, roger,"_ the air controller answered Shooter One.

"Acceleration," Emily said, and this was the one that had her worried. She opened her throttle all the way, engaging her jet's afterburners and kicking her airspeed up over eight hundred knots, no where near the jet's maximum, before deciding that her forward throttle was fine. "Deceleration," she noted, pulling the throttle back. She watched her airspeed drop, holding it until the computer in her cockpit alerted her of a stall warning.

"_Everything looks good from back here,"_ Missi reported. _"Want to break off?"_

"No, I'm good. Let's get back to the furball."

"_Misfile One, what's your status?"_ Magic asked.

"Looking for action," Emily answered, scanning the skies and turning toward where there still seemed to be fighting.

"_Second flight of bandits approaching from the south."_

She turned in that direction just in time to see two more Su-27s shoot past her, and she hauled her jet around to the left until she was behind them. "Have them on radar and visual, Magic. Engaging."

The two enemy pilots, having underestimated the F-22's turning rate, never knew the danger they were in. A missile each from Emily and Missi scrubbed those two from the combat board. _"Where the hell is Tiger?"_ Missi remarked. _"By the time they get here, we'll have hosed the whole crowd."_

Emily opened her mouth to answer, but her radar warning receiver lit up like a Christmas tree, the warning tone loud in her ears as she snapped hard to the left, glanced down to see what kind of lock was on her, and then dumped chaff to throw off the radar-guided missile. She watched it pass by on her right, then turned back to lead her pursuer toward Missi.

"_Shit, he's turning inside my arc,"_ her wingman reported. _"He'll be on your six, give me a second."_

That second could mean the difference between living or dying, but Emily was determined not to die here today. Tracer fire snapped over her plane, but instead of diving as many would have instinctively done, and got her engines shot out for her troubles, she snapped up on her right wing and cranked her throttle back, turning at a much tighter radius than the Su-27 could follow. She looked back over her left shoulder to see the enemy falling behind, struggling to catch up, and further back, Missi's F-22 coming around to finish it.

The enemy pilot, demonstrating his experience, broke to avoid being taken down by Missi, and Emily came back around, keeping her eyes on the enemy jet while she flipped her weapon selector over to the AIM-9X Sidewinder. Unlike the 9M, the 9X model was even more advanced, its tracking systems designed to be used along with her helmet HUD to lock onto targets she wasn't even facing. She painted the enemy with a missile lock, but held off on firing, even though the 9X was rated with a 90-degree off-boresight—the front of the plane—targeting capability. Spooked by her lock, the enemy moved to break off her lock, and was thereby unaware when Missi locked a standard 9M and fired. Thinking that it was Emily that had fired, the enemy pilot executed a turn that would have protected him from a missile from her, but allowed Missi's to make a gentle arc to course correct and detonate just below his right wing, shearing it off and sending him spinning out of control.

"Good kill," Emily praised, coming around to let Missi form up with her and head back into battle.

"_Bandit approaching at high speed,"_ Magic warned the combat pilots. _"We've already lost two allied aircraft to it. Be careful."_

They were out over the harbor area now, their flight path carrying them parallel to the shore. Their radars picked up new enemy contacts coming in from the sea, moving perpendicular to their course on an approach into the city. At the same time, Magic, spotting them nearest the target, contacted them. _"Misfile One, bandits approaching Boston Harbor area. You are cleared to engage."_

"Copy that, Magic," Emily answered, moving to intercept. Missi automatically chose the bandit she wasn't targeting, allowing the older pilot to follow when the enemy, detecting them, cut in toward them and passed too fast for either side to get a good shot off.

Emily turned in his wake, g forces crushing her into her seat, locking on and sending a missile after his engines. The enemy dropped flares and didn't even really move to get out of the missile's flight path, testament to either his bravado or his skill. It had to have been skill, Emily knew; bravado got pilots killed. She was up against a skilled enemy now.

Closing the distance, she opened fire with her M61A1 Vulcan cannon, her shots cutting into his left wing as he broke right to evade. She stayed on him, attempting a close range missile lock, but his constant maneuvers made it difficult to lock onto him. Four more Su-27s, pursued by their equal number of F-16C Falcons, shot past her left as she chased her target, their sudden appearance distracting her for just a moment.

The flash of an explosion ahead caught her attention again, a skyscraper construction crane having been hit with a missile and now falling into her path. As she dipped down to avoid it, she had to grin and give the enemy some credit; the four enemy pilots had deliberately cut close enough to her to draw her attention, allowing a fifth to hit that crane and hope she'd fly into the falling obstacle before she realized it was there.

But even as she cleared that obstacle, she knew she'd fallen into another level of their trap as an enemy jet dropped into her tail, sending tracers flying through the air around her. This one was hungry, he wanted a guns kill, and she knew that with Missi wrapped up with other enemies she'd have to get creative to save her ass from this one. So she took advantage of his hunger, feathering back her throttle while evading his cannon fire; he was remarkably bad at leading her plane. Once he was close enough, she cranked her throttle all the way to nothing and pulled back on the stick, sending her nose into the sky. Her plane inverted in less than fifty meters, completing a full rotation as she slammed her throttle forward again and nosed in, their positions now reversed.

Glancing down at her radar, she spotted three more Su-27s coming toward her, apparently to pass by her engagement and get somewhere else. Flipping her weapons over to AIM-120C advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles—AMRAAM—she waited until the three enemies had caught up with the one she was pursuing, her radar locked on to all four at once, and she launched. The three newcomers, not expecting her to attack them, had no chance, and the one she had been chasing, expecting an infrared missile, was unable to recover from dumping the wrong countermeasures and failed to evade in time, his shredded plane joining the others on their descent into the bay.

"_Nice kills!"_ Missi praised, sliding back in on her wing, her own quartet of enemies dealt with. _"And people thought we were lying about our adventures in Iraq."_

"_Misfile, be advised,"_ the F-16 flight leader—Tiger One—warned as Emily and Missi moved back toward the city. _"Bandits running north in your direction over the Longfellow Bridge."_

"Roger that, we'll take them," Emily responded, spotting the enemy flier heading in their general direction and moving to engage. With just the one target, Missi hung back once more to cover her flight leader.

The enemy jet shot past Emily's nose at a distance of less than twenty meters, and she came around hard to pursue. Missi, from her position, painted him with a missile lock, spooking him back in toward Emily so that the older woman wouldn't have to turn so harshly to get on his tail. Even as she came around and closed to guns range, Magic made an announcement to all of the combatants that chilled her blood, _"Magic to all allied aircraft. The King of the Mountain has been sighted."_

That announcement spooked her just enough that she triggered a missile before being fully locked-on. The enemy jet slipped down to lure it, then pulled back hard again to get out of its path. She unconsciously watched her missile sail off into the distance before exploding harmlessly. Physically shaking herself out of the grip of cold fear, she adjusted herself in her seat and dedicated herself to the chase of the enemy before her. If she had to fight the King of the Mountain...

Well, she'd deal with that when the time came.

The enemy before her had led them back into the harbor area, and was now skimming dangerously close to loading cranes and massive cargo tankers in an attempt to get her to crash into one of them. Clearly, this one hadn't seen her downtown skyscraper chase earlier in the fight. Her superior maneuverability, plus the fact that she was behind him and could take easier moves to avoid the obstacles he was putting before them, drained her far less than it drained him, and it was beginning to show. He just barely managed to avoid clipping the last tanker in the row, and now, just like the last enemy who'd tried this, he had nothing to hide behind. She waited for a missile lock and fed a Sidewinder up his tailpipe, rolling left to avoid the flaming jet debris falling into her path.

"_Looks like they're targeting I-95,"_ Misfile Three remarked over the radio.

Once clear of the debris, another jet was immediately before her, and she fell into his wake, her tracers lighting up the air around him. This one was fairly nimble at evading fire, and so she settled into observing his evasive patterns as she chased him back over the city. Once she got him figured out, she'd down him. Off to her left, a burning Su-27 slammed down into the center of I-95, the explosion tearing massive chunks out of the highway.

That had apparently caught the enemy's attention as well, as his evasive maneuvers ceased for the briefest of moments, but it was all she needed. Lining her jet up, she shredded his engines with cannon fire, pulling up and away as his canopy burst off and he was propelled out of his plane by the ejection seat.

"_Magic, have we identified which aircraft is carrying Trinity?"_ Tiger One asked.

"_Still unknown, Tiger One."_

"_Understood."_

"_Aircraft approaching at high speed!"_ Missi warned, the beeping of the radar warning receiver audible in the background of her transmission.

Another Su-27 shot between Emily and Missi, close enough for her jet to rattle from the wake of enemy's passing. She and Missi curved in opposite directions to pursue him, even as the radio went active again with the voice of Shooter One, _"Misfile, careful. We've got a downed pilot and civilian casualties."_

Knowing that Emily was busy getting into killing position on the enemy jet, Missi answered, _"Sorry, I'll owe you a tune-up later."_

Shooter One chuckled. _"Yeah, just as long as it's you doing the work and not that good-for-nothing brother of yours."_

Pursuing the enemy down to a low altitude, Emily listened as Missi, true to form, took the time to fill the radio waves with nonsense. _"Hey, did any of you guys watch that race yesterday? Was the Kamikaze really in bounds when she cut that guy off?"_

"_Radio discipline, Misfile Two,"_ Magic admonished, though the amusement was obvious in his tone.

They were back over the Longfellow Bridge again now, the distance between Emily's jet and the enemy's closing with every second. She had a good read on him now, and so fired past his left side, then immediately stamped on her rudder pedal and rolled partially, lining herself up on where he was going to evade to and firing before he even moved. He realized his mistake too late, the side of his jet peppered with 20mm rounds as he spiraled out of control and crashed into the bay.

"Missi, fuel status," she asked.

After a moment's delay, her wingman answered, _"Enough for two or three more."_

"Roger. Wing, let's finish this."

"_Magic to Misfile One. Four bandits coming north at very low altitude. Heading is zero-two-five."_

"Moving to engage. Missi?"

"_I got enough fuel for these guys."_

"Roger, Misfile Two," she said, moving down to get on the bandits' rear quarter. "Keep an eye on your fuel status."

These enemies were either stupid or focused on their mission, not noticing Emily and Missi drop down behind them. They were flying in a tight formation, a fool's errand in a live battlefield, and they wouldn't live to learn from the clinic she was about to put on. "Missi, lock 'em."

Knowing the plan, Missi simply answered, _"Two,"_ and painted them for Sidewinder locks. Before they could break formation, Emily locked them with another quartet of AMRAAM missiles and fired, watching with satisfaction as the four multimillion dollar Russian jets turned into very expensive scrap piles falling toward the harbor.

Emily's radar warning receiver lit up at the same time Missi announced, _"Colonel, it's him! The king bastard!"_

Her breath hitching in her chest, she looked out to see an Su-35, a Russian jet on par with the F-22, in a head-on approach toward her. She couldn't see it due to the angle of approach, but she knew that the vertical stabilizers of the enemy jet featured a king's crown and a Merkur XR4Ti race car. She saw light flare from beneath its left wing pylon at the same time her onboard computer began to tone, _"Missile. Missile."_

Her conscious mind shut down, locked up in fear from having to face down the most feared ace in the jet fighter world. It was by instinct alone that she managed to pull out of the missile's path and dump the appropriate countermeasures to break its lock on her. Coming back around, she whipped around in her seat, frantically trying to see from where the King would attack her next. When she finally found him, she was surprised to see that he wasn't attacking her, instead tucked into Missi's rear quarter and closing in with every second.

With shaking hands, she moved in to protect her wingman, barely able to hear the lock-on tone over the sound of her ragged breathing in her ears, and launched a Sidewinder at the enemy jet. Red flares fell from the tail of the King's Su-35 as the enemy ace broke away from the contact. Missi wasted no time in coming around to repay the favor, growling out over the radio, _"You're _mine_, king bastard."_

Tracers from Missi's cannon cut through the sky, hemming in the Su-35 on all sides. Despite this, not a single one touched the enemy's plane, and Emily realized after a few moments of watching that the King was toying with Missi. Her wingman seemed to come to this same realization, and with an inarticulate noise of anger over the radio, sought a missile lock.

Tiring of the game, the King stood his Su-35 on its tail, throttle back to zero. For the briefest of instants, the Russian jet hung in the sky before Missi, exposed to a cannon strafe, but the younger girl was not expecting the maneuver and overshot, allowing the King to snap his nose down again and set back on her tail. With a harsh efficiency, the King opened fire, the more powerful 30mm cannon of the Su-35 nearly bisecting the F-22. Missi's left engine fell out of her plane entirely, and the flaming aircraft spun out of control.

"_Misfile Two is hit!"_ Three cried over the radio. _"She's going down! Get out, Missi! Eject!"_

Fire blossomed from the cockpit of the F-22, and for a moment, Emily feared that the fire from the engines had gotten into the cockpit, but the canopy fell away and Missi was launched skyward by her ejection seat. Emily had no time to watch for a parachute; she had to get on the King before he tucked in on her, and she knew the tricks she'd used to get out of enemy pursuit until now would serve her no purpose here.

"_Good chute, good chute!"_ Three reported, and Emily breathed a sigh of relief. She was in the hands of Shooter One and the combat search and rescue boys now, and safe from the King.

Ahead, the King was on a course perpendicular to her, cutting in and out of other combats and burning down the vastly-inferior F-16s with casual ease. Something in her gut told her that the King was just passing the time, waiting for Emily to come after him again, and that infuriated her. Opening her throttles to maximum, she set off in pursuit of the Su-35, seeking a missile lock for Sidewinders.

The moment the enemy pilot detected the attempted lock, he broke from harassing the other pilots, and the entire rest of the world dropped out of Emily's mind. It was her and the King now. No one else mattered. No one else was even _there_.

She closed to guns range, firing several bursts to see how the King would react. Furrowing her brow in frustration, she couldn't get a read on him at all. Opting for missiles, she selected the 9X instead of the 9M Sidewinder. Another advantage of the more-recent missile was advanced counter-countermeasures, systems that allowed the missile's tracking system to differentiate between flares and the heat of the aircraft. The higher rate of maneuverability due to the same kind of thrust-vectoring in the F-22 was yet another bonus; the Su-35 was more maneuverable even than the F-22.

Achieving her lock, Emily fired, then readied her finger over the guns trigger, waiting for the King to try to counter-maneuver her as he had Missi. She wasn't disappointed. With flares spreading out from either side of the King's Su-35 like a horrible facsimile of an angel's wings, the nose of the fighter came up. Unlike the tail-stand maneuver that he had used against Missi, the King was using the complete loop maneuver that she had used previously to evade one of the other Russian fighters.

Despite herself, Emily caught herself looking up as the King's jet passed over her own. It was probably due to the adrenaline of the situation enhancing her perception, but time slowed to a crawl as the King's jet came into its nose-down position directly over her. From here, he could have raked her with cannon fire, but-

Wait a minute.

She could clearly see into the cockpit of the King's fighter, and though the oxygen mask obscured her enemy's mouth and nose, the helmet visor was raised, allowing Emily to clearly see her enemy's eyes, and _those were not a man's eyes_. The wide, expressive green eyes staring back down at her seemed to be equally-surprised to find a woman sitting in the cockpit of the F-22.

"The King is...a queen?" Emily murmured to herself, for a moment forgetting she was in a life or death battle.

For being just as caught off-guard, the King recovered faster, slipping in on Emily's tail and painting her with a missile lock. Swearing, she snapped her stick to the right, but the missile was already in the air. Her computer didn't even have time to warn her of its presence before it shot underneath her and exploded just behind the engine intakes, the blast kicking her jet up and filling her vision with fire.

Unbidden by her, the F-22 banked up and into a rightward spiral, smoke and flame trailing from her crippled aircraft. "Shit!" she cursed, hammering switches on her dying console, trying to force the system into a restart cycle, to shut the most heavily-damaged engine off and try to limp home on one, to do _anything_ to take back control of her plane. "Panel, dead..." she muttered to herself. "Engines, dead."

"_Get out of there, Colonel!"_ Three called over the radio. She looked up to see other jets, still engaged in the furble, streaking past her.

Four's voice came next, panic evident in his voice, _"Hit it! Get out! You're on fire!"_

That meant that there was nothing more she could do. Reaching down between her legs, she gripped the yellow-and-black striped loops with both hands and yanked with all her might. Explosive bolts in the canopy blasted it clear of the plane, letting in the shrieking, bone-chilling gale of the high-speed wind in to surround her. Miniature rocket engines in the seat fired next, boosting her up and out of the plane. She looked down at her jet as she was thrown clear, the massive holes torn into the wing structure, flames crawling up its body from the engines. That was all she had time to see before the F-22 exploded, the blast pitching her head over heels.

"_Magic, be advised,"_ Three reported as she struggled to right herself. _"Misfile One is going down. Colonel McArthur is out."_

Finally managing to turn her feet back toward the ground, she unsnapped her seat restraints at the same time she yanked the ripcord. Gripped by gravity, her seat fell away beneath her and she slowed even further as her parachute deployed, reaching up to grip the steering handles.

Now she had nothing to do but wait and watch the battle she was no longer a part of until she landed. At the very least, she was over home soil, and wouldn't have to worry about evading enemy capture. Listening to the remainder of her flight reporting on the presence of her parachute, she looked around, seeking the King's jet.

It wasn't hard to find him, or rather, _her_. The Su-35 was the fastest jet in the sky currently, threatened only by Misfile Three and Four's Raptors, and now that Emily was out of the fight, the King didn't even seem to care about Three and Four, going back to sailing through the fights and picking off unsuspecting allied planes. Now that she was no longer at a head-on angle, she could see that tail emblem that struck so much fear in the hearts of herself and others. To think, a simple crown and a specially-tuned racing car could portend so much ruin. But the crown and the car were the symbols of the King of the Mountain. As the enemy pilot passed, she watched it, and was left with the unnerving sensation that her foe was staring right back at her. And then the wake of her passing rocked her as it moved on, tossing her around but at least not getting her tangled in her parachute.

Once she stabilized, she looked around once more for the enemy ace, the unmistakable sound of its 30mm cannon—sounding for all the world like a protracted fart—directed her attention ahead just in time for an F-16 to explode before her, its spinning wreckage missing her by maybe ten meters. The King moved across her vision in a gentle arc, passing beneath a smoking F-16 that wasn't registered as a threat. A burst of cannon fire heralded another explosion before the Su-35's arc tightened, the pilot coming around to pursue some other target, and bringing it on a direct course toward her.

Her eyes widened, her heart hammering in her chest, and she feebly raised a hand to ward off the speeding jet as it began to course correct, its pilot actually trying to avoid her, but too close for it to make a difference now. She caught a glimpse of her foe's panicked, green eyes once more before everything went black.

* * *

I blame TVTropes. Both for my starting reading Misfile and for the mental image of the girls as Ace Combat pilots.


	2. Inferno

_November 20, 2020  
__NATO Expeditionary Air Field, Eastern Africa  
__0800 hours, local time_

"No!" Emily screamed, her entire body seized up in fear. Her eyes snapped open, first seeing her hand held up before her in that warding gesture, as though she could stop a speeding Russian jet fighter with just her hand. Beyond was not an Su-35 on a collision course, but the dull creme-colored ceiling of her dorm room. Her hand trembled as she stared past it, fingers clenching and then relaxing, a testament of the animalistic fear from that nightmare.

Sitting up slowly, she looked down at herself, wearing just an undershirt and nondescript panties, completely soaked in sweat, with the sheets and covers of her bed tangled around her legs. Her body flushed from the sensation of terror, her breathing coming in short, ragged gasps, she rested her forehead in her palm as she tried to get herself back under control. In the stillness of the room, the silence broken only by the ceiling fan, she could all but hear her heart pounding in her chest.

In the wake of the departing terror, a crushing melancholy followed, and she bit her lip as she felt the first stingings of tears in her eyes. Sixteen years. Sixteen years, and just when she thought she was over it, the woman with the green eyes was haunting her again. And whoever it was that had said time healed all wounds was a liar; it hurt just as much now to think of the green-eyed woman as it had when she saw her last.

A soft knock sounded at her door, so soft that at first she didn't think it was real. She looked toward the door out of the room, but when the knock sounded again, it wasn't coming from that door. She turned her head to the door leading into the shared kitchen used by herself and her suitemate. Quietly, and annoyed to hear her voice crack, she responded, "It's open."

The handle clicked loudly as it turned, and Missi stuck her head in. "Emily, are you okay? It sounded like you were having a nightmare, and I thought I heard you say..."

Nodding her head slowly, she scooted back against the headboard of her bed and leaned heavily against it. "It was a nightmare," she affirmed, swiping at her cheeks to try and hide the tears.

Missi stepped into the room, seating herself at the foot of her wingmate's bed at the older woman's unspoken invitation. She stared silently at Emily for several long moments, long enough for Emily to know that she couldn't hide her emotions from the other girl. "You dreamed about her?"

"She was an enemy pilot," Emily affirmed, nodding glumly as her eyes slightly lost their focus. "She shot you down, then shot me down, with no effort at all, and then when I was parachuting out, she...well, she was about to run her plane into me, but then I woke up."

Biting her lip, Missi reached out and laid her hand on Emily's knee in a gesture of comfort. The passage of time had dulled the pain over past events for Missi no more than it had for Emily, but it had always been worse for Emily; she had been closer to the woman, her feelings for her stronger. "I can run today's patrol for you, if you want," she offered.

Shaking her head, Emily laid her own hand over Missi's to let the younger woman know her gesture was appreciated. "No, I'll be fine. We don't have a briefing until 1100, so I'll go see the chaplain."

"If you say so. But it worries me, when you have dreams like these where you die. I don't want to have to go through that again. If I hadn't forgotten my jacket that time, then you would have..."

Emily winced, her heart constricting at the memory. "I was still just a kid then, Missi. I wouldn't..."

"You wouldn't do it _yourself_," the younger woman cut in, grabbing Emily's hand in hers and squeezing. "But you just kept looking for more and more dangerous races, and when that wouldn't satisfy you anymore, you decided to fly fighters for the Air Force. And you're always volunteering for combat deployments. You're _looking_ for fights. You _want_ to find someone better than you, someone who will..."

"Kill me," Emily whispered. "That is the only reason I do this anymore, isn't it? I'm just an adrenaline junkie with a death wish."

Missi nodded, the grief on her face unmistakable. "We lost Ash so long ago by fighting over her. You're all I've had since then. You're my big sister, my best friend. If I lost you, too..."

Emily swallowed heavily past the lump in her throat, a chill unrelated to the sweat covering her body from the night terror creeping across her. She placed her free hand over the two of Missi's that held onto hers. "I'm so sorry," she whispered. "All this time, and I've never even stopped to think about what I was doing to the people around me. All I've thought about is my pain from her leaving, and wanting to just end it. But then, you were hurting just as bad, and I never cared. How can you call me your best friend?"

"Because even though you were so focused on how much it hurt you, you still looked out for me," Missi answered with a sad smile. "Deep down, you knew just as well that we were alone. You looked out for me because you didn't want me to suffer the same way you were."

Sighing, Emily chuckled darkly and shook her head. "Maybe I oughta go to mental health and not the chaplain."

"No, they'd definitely take you off flight status," Missi answered seriously. "Especially when they started prying into everything about Ash and you had to tell them about the Misfile." Letting go of Emily's hands, she scooted away from the older woman and glanced toward the alarm clock on her nightstand, then stood up off the bed. "So...if you're still down about the dream, go see the chaplain. She'll look at you funny if you mention what we know about Heaven, but at least she won't pull your wings."

Looking over toward her wall calendar, Emily made a few mental calculations, then shrugged. "I'll let it pass this time. She may have only been in my nightmare because it's been almost sixteen years to the day that she..."

Missi frowned and watched as her flight leader and best friend went very still, her eyes partially glazing over. "I haven't heard you say her name in twelve years. I guess it's just part of your coping mechanism, but it just seems so sad..."

"Sixteen years and my heart still belongs to her," Emily said, her fingers tracing idle patterns in the sheets, her mind far away, sifting through treasured and faraway memories. "It just... I don't know. It hurts less to not say her name. It doesn't make any sense, and just saying it feels like a betrayal."

Missi said nothing, instead just stepping over and hugging Emily tightly. She wanted to point out that _they_ had been betrayed when she had never come back, to say that she owed nothing to the woman who had left them, but she didn't, because there was no disputing that Emily had never loved anyone else, and likely never would. Pointing out the truth would only hurt the older woman more.

"You're not betraying her," she whispered finally. "You're more loyal than anyone I've ever known..."

* * *

_Operations Building, Expeditionary Air Field  
__1056 hours, local time_

Pushing open the swinging double doors of the ops building, Missi preceded Emily inside, blinking rapidly several times as her eyes adjusted from the brightness outside. After their heart-to-heart that morning, the two pilots had gone through their regular morning PT exercise, followed by the showers and breakfast, leaving them with time to kill spent reminiscing about the good old days before the briefing for the day's mission.

Inside the ops building, dozens of uniformed personnel moved about, some the other pilots in the day's mission, but the majority were tiger-striped ABU-clad enlisted whose everyday jobs were part of ensuring smooth mission operations. As they moved down the hallway, one non-commissioned officer with his nose buried in a binder of documents nearly ran headlong into them, but looked up in time to notice them and quickly stepped out of the way. Emily gave him a courteous nod as they passed.

Taking a right at the next intersection, the two pilots found an old friend of theirs standing in the hallway outside the main briefing room, speaking with another air crew member. The man was a former racer from their high school days, much as they were, a prodigy who had nearly beaten Emily in his first race against her, and eventually wound up amassing enough experience and skill to wipe the Old Road with her regularly. He had joined the Air Force shortly after Emily and Missi, but he had gone into the near-extinct bomber corps rather than the fighters as the two women had.

As they neared, the man turned, and the coffee mug he held in his right hand became visible. "Hey, Logan!" Missi called out. "That coffee for us?"

The younger pilot rolled his eyes and smirked. "I keep telling you, Missi, I'll provide coffee when you provide donuts." He leaned up against the wall behind him, giving a nod to the older of the two women. "Emily."

"Good to have you with us, Logan," Emily said. "How's the AC-130 treating you?"

"Well, it's no Lancer, but it's not a bad crate," he responded, then sipped his coffee. "All checked out and ready to go. Too bad there won't be much use for it around here."

"That's just more time for you to practice that 'flying in circles' thing," Missi teased, drawing an elliptical pattern in the air with her right index finger. "You're used to chasing your own tail, so you shouldn't have a problem."

Logan gave a sly grin. "Hey, I chase tail, alright..."

Emily chuckled at this as Missi gave Logan a good-natured jab to his left shoulder, but before any of them could say anything more, a thickly-accented voice from down the hall drew their attention: "My men do not need help from the Americans, General. We will take the rebels ourselves."

The trio turned to look down the hall, where an older man wearing a Russian duty uniform stood before a French general and several pilots from various countries. One of the pilots looked somewhat familiar to Emily, but she couldn't exactly place him. All of them wore Russian-style flightsuits, but none of them bore Russian flags on their sleeves. They had to belong to that mercenary fighter unit that she had heard was coming to assist the NATO mandate to eliminate a separatist uprising in this part of Africa.

"Fighter escort is standard procedure, General Stagleishov," the French general, Pierre La Pointe, the expeditionary NATO commander of the operation, answered calmly, unflustered by being surrounded by Stagleishov and his men. "You know that. NATO policy."

Stagleishov took a step closer to La Pointe, attempting to play the 'threatening lowered voice' trick but forgetting to do the 'lower his voice' part. "We are mercenaries, General La Pointe. Not NATO." Stepping back, he looked toward the pilot that was maddeningly-familiar. "Major Reynolds."

"Yes, General?" the man answered, and that was when Emily realized who he was.

"Take your squadron into the air," Stagleishov ordered.

"Yes, sir," the major said, turning and striding away.

At that point, Stagleishov turned to see the three American pilots viewing the confrontation from down the hall. His dismissive opinion of them was all but broadcast in his facial expression, and both Logan and Missi met him in kind with expressions that left no doubt of _their_ opinion of _him_. Emily, for her part, still looked as though someone had bludgeoned her with a brick.

"Man, what a dick," Missi muttered once he had disappeared around the next corner. Turning back toward Emily, she started to expand on that thought, but drew up short when she saw the look on her friend's face. "Emily? What's wrong?"

"That squad leader..." the taller woman said. "I _know_ him. Well, _knew_ him. A little."

"Oh? From back home?"

It took all of Emily's will not to crumple under the weight of even _more_ memories of her long-lost friend dredged up by having seen that man. "His name is James. I guess you could say that I owe my racing knowledge to him. He was the one who taught..."

Missi didn't name the woman they were thinking of, but the way her lips pressed together into a thin line made it clear she understood the inference. "I never knew about him. What happened?"

"He was a year ahead of us, and went off to college the semester before the Misfile happened," Emily explained. Logan, like Missi, was one of the people who knew the full story, along with select others from their hometown back in Massachusetts. "He came back home to visit that summer, hoping that the two of them could _pick up where they left off_."

"Oh..." Missi murmured.

Then she rocked back slightly, her eyes widening. "_Oh_! And she freaked out because...did they?"

"Yes, but before the Misfile. I mean, the different history-"

"No, I got it," Missi said, holding out a hand to forestall further explanation, her face paling. "So she flipped shit, and it went to pot from there?"

Nodding, Emily crossed her arms over her chest, only the knowledge that she was in public around her peers, junior officers, and enlisted personnel keeping her from hugging herself for comfort. "He thought Rumisiel was taking advantage of her, and challenged her to a race, the terms being that she'd get back with him if she lost, or he'd piss off if she won."

"I know it's a pretty foregone conclusion but I just want to hear it myself," Missi said, thoroughly squicked out by what she was hearing. "_Please_ tell me she mopped the Old Road with him."

Smiling faintly, Emily gave an affirming nod. "It was a bit hard to watch, actually. He went back to college after summer vacation and we never heard from him again."

Turning to look in the direction the mercenary pilots had gone, Missi tapped her lip with one gloved finger. "Huh. I wonder if he'd recognize you anymore. I mean, you didn't know it was him until you heard his name."

"Maybe," Emily answered noncommittally, walking down the hallway toward where General La Pointe still stood. "I was sort of in the background for that entire fiasco."

"Colonel McArthur," La Pointe said as they approached. "Enemy aircraft have been extremely active all across the target area. We are going to need everything you and your squadron have. We have been gathering intelligence on this new weapon that the helicopters encountered. Give it to your intel officer as soon as possible."

"Yes, sir," Emily answered, waiting as La Pointe walked away before moving forward toward the exit onto the flightline.

* * *

_F-16C Fighting Falcon, Tail Number 004, Callsign "Misfile One"  
1343 hours  
_

"_Misfile One, clear to taxi. Hold short of runway."_

"Misfile One copies," Emily answered, guiding her single-engine aircraft down the taxiway with a practiced and experienced hand, pulling up short at the instrument hold line painted several feet short of the primary runway. Ahead, a number of Mirage 2000-5 aircraft belonging to the allied French squadron _Lion_ goosed their throttle to begin the takeoff sequence. Misfile would be following the rest of Lion Squadron into the air.

"_God, I hate these jets,"_ Missi grumbled. "_I haven't flown in an F-16 since training. What, was this mission important enough to send the Air Force's best squadron but not the best jets to come along with us?"_

"_Hey, save some of that fire for the bad guys, Two,"_ Misfile Three remarked.

"_Both of you douse it,"_ Misfile Four cut in. _"Boss, there's something in the sky. Two high."_

Emily looked in the direction indicated by her fellow pilot, seeing a long streak of dark smoke cutting across the sky. Blinking, she leaned forward and squinted to try and determine what was at the head of the smoke column. "_Is that a transport?"_ Missi asked.

"_Attention all radios, these nets. Attention all radios, these nets. We have an in-flight emergency in progress. Visiting KC-10, tail number 298, callsign Hunter One-Nine. Nature of emergency is combat damage and engine failure. Four souls on board, fuel remaining, twelve hours. Give way to all responding emergency vehicles."_

Her eyes shifting from the rapidly-descending tanker to the handful of aircraft still in place on the runway, Emily could feel her heart beginning to pound. A slight tremor ran through her body, clenching her jaw slightly. It was a sign of anxiety, she told herself, not of fear. The half-dozen Mirage 2000s on the runway held their position, expecting that the tanker would pass over them and land on the plenty of space still left on the runway. Back in the US, such an action would've landed those pilots in a mess of trouble for not clearing the runway for an in-flight emergency, but she was well familiar with these sorts of things happening in deployed locations.

Suddenly, flame burst from the tanker's remaining engine, the sound of the explosion a muffled pop through her canopy as Missi let slip, _"Whoa, shit!"_

"_He's burning,"_ someone outside her squadron commented. _"He's coming right at us!"_

Now having lost engine control, the flaming tanker's nose dipped dangerously toward the ground, on course to completely obliterate the idling jets on the runway. They were not unaware of this situation, and began to lumber away to either side of the runway as their pilots made frantic calls in their native languages over the comms.

It wasn't until a flight of MiG-21bis Fishbed aircraft roared over the crippled tanker that Emily realized the explosions on the tanker were a result of continuing missile attacks. Fresh flame poured from the crashing aircraft, fueled by the hundreds of gallons of jet fuel contained within its frame. _"All units, the tanker has lost control! Get out of the way!"_

Panic seized Emily as her mathematically-inclined eye instantly tracked its angle of approach and determined that the tanker was on a collision course with her and the others in her flight. Releasing the brakes, she began to feather the throttle in an attempt to evade when the tanker's pilot managed to elevate the nose just enough so that it wouldn't plow into her. The right engine dropped free of the plane entirely and smashed into an idling Mirage 2000, causing the smaller jet to explode and set fire to the runway.

The right wing of the tanker dipped and struck the runway, kicking the left side up and allowing the body of the plane to pass over her canopy with perhaps fifteen feet to spare. She watched in growing horror as it continued to skid on that wing, before the stresses snapped the wing off and sent the fuselage smashing nose-first into the ground. The force of that impact sheared the horizontal stabilizers from the tail and snapped the aircraft's spine, sending the two halves of the fuselage rolling forward. Thick black smoke obscured her vision of the violent crash, but scant moments later a massive explosion filled her in on the fate of the tanker.

"_Shit!"_ Misfile Four exclaimed. He had been furthest down the row, with the least amount of clearance from the crashing tanker. Emily wouldn't have blamed him at all if he needed to change his pants.

The plight of the tanker's crew was horrible, but they still had a mission to accomplish. Emily led her flight out onto the burning, smoke-covered runway, running her throttle up and feeling the acceleration push her back into her seat as she kept an eye out for any debris that could be sucked up by her engine. "Misfile Flight, take off. Switch to channel four."

Her three pilots acknowledged her, and she could see in the rearview mirrors mounted around her canopy that they were following behind her. _"Misfile, those bandits are coming back around. You're clear to engage and destroy."_

"Understood," Emily responded as her stomach, and the ground, fell out from beneath her. As soon as her altimeter indicated she had cleared sixty feet, she arced into a gentle roll toward the left. Above her and to her right, the mercenary allied squadron, designated as Red Moon, were forming on their flight leader.

"_Misfile, be advised,"_ James, as Red Moon One, radioed her. _"We have several contacts on radar approaching from the southeast. Confirmed hostile."_

"Roger, Red Moon Leader," she responded, counting out six hostile contacts on her radar. "We're right behind you."

The six contacts broke into pairs as she and the rest of her flight closed, spreading outward like blossoming flower petals. Her radar warning receiver began to beep with enemy radar painting as she led Missi toward an engagement with the topmost pair of bandits. _"Good to have you with us today, Colonel,"_ James remarked.

Emily furrowed her brow behind her visor. He was certainly a chatty one, wasn't he? "Ditto that, Major Reynolds," she answered half-attentively, completing a loop that brought her around on her target's rear quarter. The radar detection and electronics packages of the MiG-21 were ancient, so it was entirely possible that her target wasn't even aware he was being painted. She thought for a moment that the Sidewinder she sent curving in on him might give him a clue, but the flaming debris descending to the savannah floor moments later changed that theory.

"_I hope you've got plenty of vodka on ice, comrade,"_ Missi butted in, teasing the fact that James' commander was a prick of a Russian. _"You're paying tonight."_

James took the jab in stride, chuckling as he responded, _"We'll see who pays."_

Curving around, Emily moved to attack the second MiG-21, but its signal vanished from her radar in time with an explosion in the air beyond, and a disparaging commentary from Missi: _"Man, these guys are a joke. Their buckets don't even have radar in them."_

"Stay focused, Missi," Emily chastised as the crack of ground-based anti-aircraft artillery filled the skies off to her left, breaking up a formation of MiG-21s with several going down in flames. "Skilled pilots can overcome the deficiencies of their machines."

The shadow of a plane passed over her, and she looked over to see an enemy fighter in a banking turn. Cutting back her throttle, she turned after the MiG-21, her targeting system beeping sedately as it sought a lock on the jet. The green square surrounding it flashed red as a text box at the top of the HUD panel mounted to her dash announced 'LOCK' and a second one below flashed 'SHOOT' due to her optimal angle of attack.

Pressing her thumb down on the red trigger button, a 9M shot out from beneath her left wing, arcing out ahead of the enemy jet on an intercept course rather than simply chase after it from behind. The enemy pilot noticed the incoming missile and rolled over to dive, but the Sidewinder tightened its arc and exploded just beneath the now-exposed cockpit. Its pilot dead, the MiG-21 remained in its nosedive to the surface.

Tracer fire shot past the nose of her jet from the left, and she immediately dove and twisted up onto her right wing to protect the radar equipment in the nose and—more importantly—the cockpit. The attacking enemy plane streaked past her in parallel flight to the ground, darkening her cockpit once more. Throttling back to tighten the turn, she came about on his tail and opened the throttle again, her index finger sliding down to caress the trigger of the 20mm Vulcan gun.

The F-16C she piloted just barely had a speed advantage over the MiG-21, and she pressed it to the maximum to close the distance into guns range. Her HUD automatically changed the central reticle to a pair of whip-like parallel wire frames that represented where shots she fired from the gun would go due to maneuvers and airspeed. Carefully leading the enemy plane, she fired a burst of high-explosive incendiary rounds into its path, stitching fire along its right flank and blasting whole bits of metal out of the frame. Something in the enemy aircraft exploded, shearing the forward section off entirely as it cartwheeled through the sky. Smirking, Emily remarked, "Good night," and turned back toward the center of the engagement.

"_Misfile Two, bandit on your back!"_ Three alerted.

Craning her head around, Emily looked for her friend's aircraft, finding it engaged in a hard turn with a MiG-21 tucked in behind her. Though faster, the F-16C surrendered some maneuverability to the Russian-made crate, and this pilot looked experienced enough to capitalize. _"He's locked!"_ Missi announced. _"Jinking!"_

"_Coming,"_ Three told her.

"_Misfile Three, bandit closing with you,"_ Four announced.

"_Three, let's try something crazy,"_ Missi said. _"Come straight at me, then we break right, _both_ go right, at the last second."_

"_This ain't a movie, Missi!"_ Three told her.

Emily brought her aircraft in line with her engaged squadmates, hoping to spook one or both of the enemy jets away, but they seemed quite determined in their pursuit of the other F-16s. _"Missile,"_ her computer warned, and her eyes snapped down to her radar display to see an AA-8 Archer, a poor clone of the American Sidewinder, coming in from her rear left quarter. Rolling until the sky was beneath her plane, she pulled back on the stick and dumped flares. The enemy missile took the bait, sailing through the center of the burning countermeasures and losing its lock on her.

That immediate threat dealt with, and vowing to take out the enemy that had shot at her later, she turned back to see what was becoming of Missi's wild scheme. She found them visually again just in time to watch the two F-16s, surely on a collision course, turn to their respective right sides and flash past one another with almost no room to spare. Their pursuing MiG-21s, overcome by the red haze of wanting a close-in guns kill, failed to react properly and smashed into each other.

"_Whoo-hoo, that was awesome!"_ the excitable young woman cheered as she circled the flaming, hopelessly-intermingled wrecks of the enemy planes. _"I totally didn't think that would work!"_

"_Jesus, you are nuts,"_ Three grumbled. _"Next time we just deal with that the old-fashioned way. You just shaved years off my life, Missi."_

"_If at first you _do_ succeed, Two, try not to look so surprised."_

"_All allied aircraft, this is air defense unit Jericho. We're online and we can take any hostiles inside base airspace. We have your backs, gents, just lead them to us."_

"Misfile copies," Emily replied, arcing down toward an enemy MiG attempting a low-level pass on the base.

"_Red Moon copies."_

"_Lion copies."_

No sooner had she achieved target lock than another enemy dropped in close, tracers cutting past her right side as the enemy sought to down her. Slamming her throttle back to nothing, she yanked her stick to the left to turn tightly over the base's runway, the enemy overshooting her in his zealousness. Bringing her throttle back up to a normal speed, she reversed the orientation of her plane to come around on him, but before she could, anti-aircraft fire from the base's defenses tore into the enemy, shredding its control surfaces and sending it into a flaming nose-dive into the savannah floor.

"_Nailed him!"_ the triple-A gunner announced. _"You're clear, Colonel!"_

"_Leader, just got one more on radar,"_ Missi announced.

Emily glanced down at her radar screen, then rolled onto her left wing to go after the remaining target. "Roger that, Wing. Let's finish this."

By the time she'd aligned, the allied MiG-29 Fulcrums flown by Red Moon had already descended on the hapless lesser-generation MiG. Her radar identified the one who had just fired a missile as Red Moon Four. The enemy plane managed to evade the missile, but in doing so left himself exposed to a cross-strafe from James, whose heavy 30mm cannons snapped the smaller fighter in half in the center. This prompted a congratulatory remark from one of the other Red Moon pilots, the language spoken indicating that they had at least one Russian pilot.

"_Misfile Two to Red Moon One,"_ Missi remarked. _"Just glad you guys are on our side."_

"_Right back at you, Misfile Two."_

"_Lion One to Misfile One,"_ the French squadron leader radioed in. _"We are engaging bandits over the oil field. We need help, Colonel."_

Turning her jet in a slow, lazy arc toward the southeast, in the direction of a large oil field and refinery that the NATO operation was in place to protect from the anti-government separatists, she could see the faint black spots of aircraft in the distance, half of which were treated to green enemy target boxes as she brought her forward HUD to line over them. "Roger that, Lion. We're en route."

"_Cavalry to the rescue!"_ Missi added.

Misfile's F-16s, closer to the scene of the engagement, reached the battle first. The Mirage 2000s of Lion Flight far outmatched the MiG-21s flown by the enemy, but it was apparent that Lion did not have the experienced fliers that Misfile and Red Moon did. The four American pilots branched out, seeking individual targets amongst the dozen enemy units.

Emily's radar beeped rapidly three times before segueing into the solid tone of a lock. No sooner had her thumb began to depress the firing stud than her radar warning receiver added its distinctive beep to the cockpit noise, along with the computer warning, _"Missile. Missile."_

Her eyes fell to her radar, picking out the white line on the screen that represented the incoming warhead. Calculating its distance, she quickly launched a missile at the target she was locked onto before pulling her jet into a climb, red flares burning into her wake. On the radar screen, the enemy missile shot past her and didn't turn to correct, and so she rolled at the apex of her climb to put the sky back above her, seeking out the target she'd been locked to before in time to see another Russian-made missile take it out.

"_Red Moon Flight is engaging enemy aircraft over the oil fields,"_ James announced as his squad dove into the fray. _"We're here to help, Misfile One."_

"Roger that, Red Moon," she replied automatically, looking out of her canopy to track another target as she twisted the flight stick to bring her aircraft in line with it. By the time she'd pointed her nose at it, she was lopsided, so a simple roll brought her onto the same plane of alignment as the enemy fighter.

"_Don't want us to have all the fun, eh, Reynolds?"_ Missi taunted.

James chuckled as Emily achieved a target lock and fired. To her frustration, the enemy drew her missile off with flares. _"Since we have better planes, we get more enemies,"_ the mercenary quipped back.

"_Better planes? Hehe, bring it on, baby!"_

Ahead, the MiG-21 she had targeted had come around, she and her opponent spiraling around one another through the sky. He just barely managed to get her in his forward arc, enough so that his radar tried to lock onto her, and he launched a missile that shot wildly past her nose before he, too, overshot. Frowning, she throttled back into a high-g turn, the roar of her engine dialing down to a low rumble as she brought the MiG into _her_ forward arc. "Missile Use One-Oh-One," she muttered to herself, watching the green box flash red with a target lock. "Lock all the way before you fire."

Shifting her nose to get into the optimal firing position, her HUD flashed the 'SHOOT' icon and she depressed the trigger, her Sidewinder streaking out into the path of the enemy fighter. It detonated somewhere just ahead and above the cockpit, superheated shrapnel fragments gutting the ancient jet. She didn't wait to watch it crash, turning to pursue a new target. A quick glance around, and confirmed by her radar screen, showed that the battlespace was almost devoid of enemy activity that wasn't already tied up by Red Moon or Lion, save two lonely blips coming in at vastly different altitudes.

"_Bandits high and low, boss,"_ Missi remarked, having detected them as well. _"Which ones do we want?"_

The rising nose of Emily's F-16 answered that question, Missi pulling in expertly behind and to her side as she called, "Three, Four, take the low man. We've got up high."

"_Three copies."_

Missi sideslipped to the right, gaining separation from her flight leader in order to react to anything the enemy jet might pull. Emily bore in, tightening her climb to intercept the MiG-21. Reacting to her presence, it rolled up onto its right wing and curved as though to head back in the direction it had come, forcing an overshoot from Emily. Missi, further back, easily corrected for the maneuver and cruised in after it, her systems seeking an infrared lock. Demonstrating skill, the enemy pilot dodged and slipped around in Missi's HUD, stymieing the seekers in her Sidewinders.

By now, Emily had oriented herself on the enemy jet as well, coming in on a side-on angle. See-sawing her nose up and down as she tightened in on him, she fired bursts from her cannon to hem him in above and below, reducing his options for evading Missi's targeting. It was only moments later that the Chinese woman announced, _"Fox Two,"_ and a Sidewinder rode a plume of smoke from beneath the wing of her jet, arcing into the heat of the MiG's engine. The missile blasted the vertical stabilizer and right horizontal stabilizer from the aircraft's frame, sending it into an out-of-control flat spin.

"_MiG down,"_ Misfile Three announced.

"_Good kill,"_ Four answered.

Emily looked around her aircraft as she turned in a slow circle to get a full visibility of the battlefield, finding no other threats in visual range. A scan of her radar confirmed that her flight, Red Moon, and Lion were by themselves over the oil fields. "All bandits destroyed," she reported.

"_Misfile One, thanks for the help,"_ Lion One affirmed.

"_Damage to the facilities appears light,"_ James remarked, flying a low loop around the oil refinery.

"_Kingmaster to all available allied aircraft,"_ the control tower from their base reported in. _"We've lost all power to our radar system. Our defenses are offline and we're taking a pounding here. Misfile, requesting immediate assistance."_

Tightening her arc, Emily turned her fighter to the north, barely able to make out pinpoint specks of enemy aircraft attacking their base. Thick, black smoke was beginning to rise into the air; the enemy weren't far into their attack yet. "Roger that, Kingmaster. Misfile Flight, head back and protect the base."

"_Where the hell did _they_ come from?"_ Missi demanded sourly as she moved into position off Emily's wing. _"It's like they just got spawned by some omnipotent AI system after we wiped out the last group of targets."_

"_A little too many video games, I think, Misfile Two,"_ James responded with a chuckle. He didn't bother to remind her that aircraft, especially small ones like the MiG-21s, could take advantage of their terrain knowledge to fly below the level of most radar coverage and therefore seem to appear out of nowhere attacking the base.

"Kingmaster, we're here," Emily reported once she and her fellows had reached the airspace of the base. Her radar showed the MiG-29s of Red Moon close behind.

Ominously, no one responded from the air traffic control tower. From the sky, they had a remarkable view of the damage done to the base while they had been busy over the oil fields. A major fire had broken out in the munitions storage area, likely the initial target of the attack, but she knew from talking to the AMMO guys on the base that their storage area was designed to minimize damage in an attack. The main power station was also a flaming wreck, as were several anti-aircraft guns. A hole was blown into the side of the ops building, and one of the dormitories, but both buildings were still standing.

"_Oh man, they really did a number on this place,"_ Three remarked.

"_I think they blew up my room,"_ Missi murmured. Her place in the formation dipped, and a moment later, she swore, _"They blew up our rooms, One! Bastards!"_

Despite that, Emily couldn't help but snort laughter at her partner's over-the-top reaction to seeing their rooms trashed in the attack. "Let's make 'em pay for it, Two."

"_Pay for it nothing,"_ the younger woman growled, roaring out of the formation and practically gluing herself to an enemy fighter that was just becoming aware of their presence. _"If I go back and can't find my...Urgh..."_ Letting out an inarticulate noise of anger and frustration, her 20mm cannon stitched fire across the engine and wings of her target, sending the hapless plane pancaking into the ground.

"_Misfile, we need you to wipe out bandits in base airspace immediately,"_ ground control requested.

Three chuckled. _"Hell, they've pissed Missi off. Just hunker down and close your eyes, boys, she'll get 'em cleaned out in no time."_

True to Three's words, just in that short exchange, Missi had already targeted and shot down another enemy fighter with such speed and precision that it appeared as though she'd just swatted it out of the sky without even trying. Another fighter attempted to lock her up for a guns kill, but she slammed the throttle to zero and spun into a barrel roll before throttling forward again, instantly reversing their positions and burning the MiG out of the sky.

"_Whoa, she's scary when she's mad,"_ James remarked.

"_We're going to have to paint a warning label on her jet after this one,"_ Four quipped. "_'Do Not Taunt.'"_

Emily couldn't help but smile sadly behind her oxygen mask; this reminded her all too much of the good old days from just after the misfile, before one argument had completely changed her life. It was bittersweet to recall, both pleasant and sad at the same time to be reminded of the joy that she had known all those years ago.

Anti-aircraft fire crackled through the sky around her, thunderclaps in the otherwise-cloudless air; though the radar controlling the surface-to-air missiles was inoperable, the 20mm Centurion Counter-Rocket/Artillery/Mortar minigun could be manually-operated by particularly brave, particularly crazy soldiers on the ground. Their ability to actually hit anything was highly in doubt, but she couldn't fault them for giving the effort. If nothing else, their fire could distract the enemy at a crucial time and allow the pilots to score a kill they might not have otherwise.

Red Moon's fighters had caught up by then, shooting down two enemy planes before the others were even aware of their arrival. The battle descended into an even more disorganized mess, many of the attacking jets now seeming to panic at the numbers arrayed against them in conjunction with the way Missi was shredding through them like a woman possessed.

Emily watched as a pair of MiGs split to avoid Missi's carnage, one diving toward the base and the other rising and banking away. His flight path would carry him directly across Emily's plane of flight and within her cannon range unless he deviated, so she merely held her course and waited, index finger tightening over the gun trigger. As soon as he was within range, she squeezed the trigger for a short burst, her shots shredding the right side of the aircraft and puncturing the fuel tanks. The explosion practically disintegrated the aircraft. Looking to see what became of the one Missi had given chase to, she watched as the younger woman spooked it into crashing into the ground, then sailing through the resultant fireball and causing it to collapse in on itself from the wake of her passing.

"_Kingmaster to all planes. Our radar is back online."_

Surface-to-air missiles began to streak up into the sky now, adding their destructive power to the mix arrayed against the enemy fighters. With those heavy air defenses back in play, it was just mop up now. Emily turned to engage one of the last enemy contacts remaining, but it seemed to notice her action and turned in toward her as well, the two aircraft shooting past one another before either pilot could line up an attack. As she turned to get it back in her forward arc, Missi's F-16 soared past in an opposing turn, already lined up with the enemy and locking on.

"_Eat this, reb face,"_ she spat, launching a Sidewinder head-on at point-blank range. The enemy, unsuspecting of such a sudden and aggressive attack, was just starting to react when the missile exploded just behind the cockpit, breaking his fighter's back in half.

"_All bandits in base airspace destroyed,"_ Kingmaster reported.

"_Misfile, what's your status?"_ Lion One requested, even before Emily could respond to Kingmaster.

"Just finishing up over here," she replied, turning back toward the oil fields. She had a feeling that _another_ ambush unit had appeared while they were busy. "What's up?"

"_We have more bandits inbound. We could use more help."_

"Understood." She glanced down at her radar as her team formed up around her, and several hundred meters to the west, Red Moon was also formed and heading back to the oil field. She turned and looked over her shoulder at Missi's jet. "You good now, Two?"

There was a long moment of static, then, _"Gonna be pissed if I lost all my stuff. I'm under control, though. Sorry about losing it back there."_

"Happens to the best of us," Emily said as gently as she could. Emotions sometimes tended to be lost over radio transmissions, though.

"_Hey, at least you turn into a hypercompetent death machine when you get set off,"_ Three remarked. _"We need to figure out an on/off switch for that."_

"_Turning it on is easy,"_ Missi responded. _"It's switching it off I need to work on."_

"_Red Moon Flight,"_ James announced. _"We have a lot of them."_

Emily looked down at her radar screen and paled slightly. 'A lot' was a bit of an understatement. There were nearly thirty enemy jets coming in on radar. _"Where the hell do they dig up so many pilots?"_ Missi asked.

"_Don't you mean jets, Two?"_

Missi scoffed. _"I could buy thirty of these buckets just from what I make in one pay period."_

"_Red Moon to Oil Men. Ground units, come in."_ There was a long delay, during which time Emily chose her first target and angled after it. Another enemy in the formation fired a missile at her, but she glimpsed her radar screen and quickly calculated that the angle of attack was so terrible she didn't even need to use countermeasures, simply out-turning the missile and causing it to spike into the savannah. _"Ground units, respond."_

Raising her head 'up' relative to her position, Emily spotted her target and pulled back on the stick, bringing herself around on it. _"Red Moon to Misfile. I can't raise the defenders on the ground."_

"_There's a lot of smoke over the oil field,"_ Missi added, a fact that became readily apparent as Emily lined up on her target, the jet silhouetted over a pillar of smoke rising from the refinery. The enemy jet flew straight toward the smoke, even as she locked on and fired her missile. It seemed as though he thought he could confuse the missile by flying through the smoke cloud; unfortunately for him, he failed to realize that his engine was hotter than the smoke. A flash of light from the far side of the smoke, and a muffled pop reaching Emily's aircraft a moment later, proved the fallacy of that thought.

"_Lion One, bandit on your tail,"_ James warned. _"Break right."_

Emily glanced quickly in the direction her radar indicated that Lion One and James were in, catching sight of a MiG-21 tracking the Mirage 2000-5 with its cannon, and further out the MiG-29A of James cutting a high-performance turn to close the distance and engage the enemy before it could down the French pilot.

Leaving that engagement be, and trusting James and his wingman to bail out their ally, she looked ahead just as another enemy jet shot by above and to her left. Craning her head around to track it, she arced hard in its wake as her radar warning receiver pinged an alert of another enemy seeking a target lock. For whatever reason, this enemy fired before getting a full lock—perhaps he jumped the gun—and she glanced at her screen before returning her attention to the enemy she was pursuing as the wayward missile spun off into the distance.

Realizing she was chasing it, her target rapidly lost altitude and turned toward the spires and towers of the oil refinery, clearly intent on losing her within. She had no intention of letting it do so, and throttled up, closing the distance between them as the refinery drew nearer. The enemy MiG danced around in her forward arc, just managing to keep her from succeeding at locking a missile or setting up a cannon shot.

Dropping down to just a few hundred feet off the deck, the enemy jet curved in over the top of one of the refineries and continued to lose altitude, clearly intent on trying to lose Emily by flying through and between the refinery towers. She could feel her pulse begin to pound, that cold, spiky sensation coursing through her body. Fearless, she chased the MiG into the maze of towers even as it fired its cannons to destroy them. Fireballs blossomed on either side of her plane, the explosions buffeting her about as she whipped around one disintegrating tower, then rotated until her other wing faced the ground to arc around the next.

"_What the...?"_ Missi commented, the explosions of the towers drawing her eye in time to see Emily's plane race out of the fires, coming into position behind the enemy MiG and achieving missile lock. The smaller jet tried to stand on its tail and blaze directly up to avoid her attack, but the missile tracked after it and the resultant explosion snapped its wings off, centrifugal force sending it spinning away like a top.

"_Hawkeye observation unit to Kingmaster,"_ the airborne warning and control system aircraft reported. _"No active allied defenses at the oil field. Large destruction to oil facilities."_

"Shit," Emily swore under her breath, twisting her fighter through the air toward her next target. The enemy remained unaware of her until she locked onto it, at which point it immediately inverted and dove toward the ground. She mirrored his movement, successfully locking and firing a missile. Still at full afterburner, the MiG dropped flares and broke to the right, back toward the refineries again.

Passing over a group of squat, circular oil storage containers, the MiG fired a burst from its cannon, sparking the entire row of containers to explode into fire. Her heart hammering in her chest, Emily hauled back on her stick to avoid flying directly into the fires, gracefully soaring around them while keeping her eyes on the target. "Kingmaster, we have a major explosion at the oil fields," she reported, roaring over a large bundle of pipes as the fires ripped through them.

"_Boss, remember that talk we had about you doing crazy stuff in the air?"_ Missi queried. _"You're doing it again."_

The gently-delivered chastisement stung, but the adrenaline coursing through her body refused to let it get through to her mind. So maybe she was trying to get herself killed. These second-rate pilots in their ancient crates weren't going to do the job anyway.

She blinked, then shook her head to get rid of those thoughts. She couldn't just throw her life away for nothing and get killed; if she did, then Missi would be left alone. It wasn't _much_ to live for, but she felt she owed the younger woman for looking after her and sticking by her all this time. Even despite this, though, she couldn't deny that she never truly felt alive anymore unless she was pulling something in the air as insane as this.

She started to respond to Missi, but then another oil container exploded directly in her path, belching a roiling orange-and-black cloud of flame into her path. Even through all that heat and the visual concealment, her HUD indicated a lock-on of the aircraft she'd been following, and so she trusted her instruments and blindly fired a missile. Emerging from the other side of the explosion, she saw her faith rewarded with the enemy jet spinning out of control to the ground, its right wing and both horizontal stabilizers destroyed.

"_Still with me?"_ Missi asked.

"Got a little cooked, but I'm good," Emily responded, looking out of her canopy for more targets.

"_Kingmaster, this is Red Moon,"_ James reported. _"There are no ground units responding to the fires down there. They must've been wiped out."_

"_Acknowledged,"_ Kingmaster answered tensely.

As that exchange took place, another MiG nearly collided with Emily, the enemy pilot's quick roll toward her left side all that prevented a midair disaster. She arced around after it, going wide around the two oil wells it attempted to lead her through. It passed over more storage containers that were just being reached by the explosions, one blasting skyward the very moment she passed over it. It skimmed the top of another oil well, and again, rather than repeat his move, she merely flew around it. Tiring of its antics, she waited as the seeker beeped out its lock-on attempts.

"_He's going to break right,"_ Missi warned.

"I have him," Emily responded, rolling up onto her right wing and pulling back on the stick to stay with it. Her HUD flashed red, the lock-on tone sounding in her ears, and she thumbed the missile trigger. The Sidewinder crossed the distance instantly, exploding underneath the engine and pitching its tail up. As close to the ground as he was, the enemy could not correct in time and cratered into the savannah. "He's down!"

"_Bandits are running off east,"_ James reported, as Emily's radar showed them doing just that. _"We are pursuing. We'd appreciate your help, Misfile."_

"Misfile, roger," she responded, curving toward the east and opening her throttle all the way. Three MiGs peeled back from the fleeing formation and came back after the Misfile F-16s. Emily and Missi obliged them with a Sidewinder each. One escaped via the use of countermeasures, while the other failed to force the missile to overshoot and intercepted it in the wing with fatal results.

"_Red Moon Leader, enemy aircraft ahead,"_ one of James' pilots warned.

"_Yes,"_ came the response, a rather unconcerned one in Emily's opinion.

"_We've got these two,"_ Misfile Three stated. _"Go give those other guys a hand."_

"Copy, Three, good hunting," Emily responded, aborting her turn to pursue the engaging jets and again turning toward the fleeing foes.

"_Red Moon One, you're too far ahead of me,"_ James' wingman announced, the beeping of his radar warning receiver audible in the background of his transmission.

"Shit, what the hell are you doing?" Emily muttered as she watched the engagement take place out of her range, out of her ability to act. Transmitting now, she queried, "Red Moon One, are you alright?"

No response.

"Missi, do you see him?"

"_I have him on radar, but no visual."_ Her younger friend swore. _"Dammit, we'd have caught up by now if we had our Raptors."_

"Nothing we can do about that now," she responded, as much to ease her own mind as Missi's.

"_This is Red Moon One,"_ James finally radioed in. The more frantic beeping of damage alerts could be heard behind his voice. _"I've taken damage. My stick isn't responding. I've lost control."_

"_Hang on, Red Moon, we're on our way,"_ Missi answered.

"_No, I can't. I'm bailing out."_

"Understood." Emily looked down to her radar screen, angling her fighter in the direction of James' radar signature, then looked up and squinted to try and make him out. Ahead of her, she could just barely make out a black dot trailing a stream of smoke and fire. A glint of light from the aircraft had to be the ejection seat punching him out of the crippled plane.

Moments later, Missi reported, _"I have a chute. He's out."_

It took a moment for Emily to spot the parachute; Missi's eyes had always been sharper. "We have a chute. Good cells. Kingmaster, this is Misfile One. We have a downed airman."

"_Roger that, Misfile. Scrambling SAR assets. Callsign, Nomad Six-Two, Nomad Six-Three."_

"_Misfile, this is Nomad Six-Two. We're en route. Keep the skies clear for us."_

"Roger that."

"_Boss, I have radar contacts north,"_ Missi said. _"Heading for Red Moon One's landing site. Looks like those runners are coming back for another round."_

"They're buying this time," Emily replied, turning to head toward the new threat. _"Three, Four, status?"_

"_Put our boys to bed and we're coming back for the next show. We'll reach them about the same time you do."_

The remaining MiG-29s of Red Moon reached the enemy first, descending into a high-altitude furball. The sheer fact that it was still going by the time the two wingpairs of Misfile arrived gave testament to the skill of the enemy pilots to keep up with the MiG-29s in much older aircraft. The four F-16Cs dove straight into it, an opening shot from Misfile Four shooting down one plane.

As she and Missi entered the engagement, one enemy broke off from an existing pursuit and came after Emily, streaking in on her tail and sending tracers reaching past either side of her plane. She dropped her throttle back and rolled to let the enemy overshoot her, tucking in behind it and shredding its engine.

Ahead, another MiG-21 heading at a perpendicular angle to her fired a missile, and her hand tightened on the stick as she barely restrained an instinctive effort to perform an evasive maneuver. Rolling onto her right wing, she turned to get on its tail just in time to see the missile it had fired explode above one of the MiG-29s, peppering the left vertical stabilizer and causing the engine to flame out.

"_I'm hit!"_ that pilot announced, panicky, the noise of damage alarms clear in the background.

"_I'm coming,"_ Misfile Four responded.

Blinded by his desire to shoot down the better plane, the enemy MiG failed to notice Emily on his tail, either ignoring or not noticing the missile alert from his computer. It almost embarrassed her how the missile seemed to disappear right up his engine before exploding, shredding the rest of the aircraft.

"_Come on, MiG boy, just try and stay with me..."_ Missi taunted to her opponent, the radar warning receiver beeping behind her voice.

Clear of an immediate opponent, Emily looked over to see her wingmate deliberately baiting the MiG on her tail to get closer, incrementally cutting back her speed and pulling just enough evasive maneuvers to keep him from getting a solid lock or a good angle for his cannon. Then, in a move so fast that Emily missed most of it, Missi was suddenly behind the enemy, firing bursts of cannon fire past his aircraft. Even from that distance, it was obvious she wasn't trying to hit him with the cannon.

"_Just can't push that crate fast enough..."_

"_Missile,"_ Emily's onboard computer warned, and her eyes snapped down to the radar screen to get its direction and distance. It was coming from an enemy passing at an oblique angle, so she cut to the left, inside the missile's turning radius, forcing it to overshoot. She glanced to her right rear to see that it wasn't coming around, and turned her attention on the offending fighter. His amateurish nature continued to show as she settled in on his tail and pounded him with cannon fire. His engine flamed out, sending him into a flat spin.

"Next," she deadpanned.

"_I can't eject!"_ cried the pilot who she had seen get hit before. A glance to her radar showed his altitude was dangerously low. _"I'm trying!"_ He let out a terrified scream, and the transmission vanished into a burst of telling static just as a small fireball blossomed on the ground below.

"_Damn it!"_ Four cursed.

"Shit." Looking down at her radar, Emily counted the enemy contacts remaining. Just the one that Missi was toying with. "Let's finish this."

Looking back to that engagement, she watched as the MiG dumped flares without Missi having even launched a missile. _"Fail, MiG driver,"_ the younger woman remarked with sadistic glee, the solid tone of a lock-on indicator behind her voice proving that the enemy had been scared into wasting his countermeasures just by the lock-on alone. _"You're dead."_ The missile that was launched crossed the distance in an instant, shredding the enemy fighter.

"_Red Moon One is down,"_ Three reported. _"He's walking... Running."_

"_Misfile, we have the area in sight,"_ Nomad Six-Two called. _"Sky is clear, no bandits. Thank you."_

Leveling out her plane, Emily watched the radar contact of the MH-60 Black Hawks on approach to rescue their downed comrade. A glance to her rear-view mirrors showed Missi taking position off her right wing, her wingmate's jet waggling its wings in the usual end-of-mission display of enthusiasm.

The radio waves crackled with static, then James' voice broke through, _"Red Moon One to allied aircraft. Are you reading me?"_

"_Reynolds?"_ Missi inquired.

"_Captain Fuller,"_ James responded, a smirk nearly audible in his voice.

"_That's affirmative! You okay?"_

"_I hurt my ankle when I landed, but..."_ The radio went silent for a moment, followed by a short, _"Fuck."_

"_Red Moon?"_

"_Rebels. They're coming."_


	3. Spooky

_November 21, 2020  
__NATO Expeditionary Airfield, Eastern Africa  
__1046 hours, local time_

Brick and scattered debris crunched under Emily's boots as she paused at what had once been the exterior wall of her room. The missile attack that had done this damage had not directly impacted the dormitory; the crater she'd stepped over about ten feet back indicated the impact point of the missile. Resting her palms on her hips, she surveyed the damages. Anything glass or otherwise easily-breakable had been just flat destroyed. Her bed had been thrown against the interior wall, the force of the hit snapping the wood frame in several places. There had been a fire, as evinced by the burned-away sheets and other scorch marks prevalent across the room.

Following the previous day's mission, she and Missi had gone through the typical post-mission debriefing, then sat in on the briefing shortly after that detailed the rescue operation for James that had launched just over an hour ago. Misfile hadn't been tapped to provide air cover for that mission, the frag going to a recently-arrived squadron instead. It was primarily a ground-op anyway, with Shooter Squadron—AH-64D Longbows from the US Army—on-hand for direct air intervention against what was expected to be an opposition composed primarily of infantry and unarmored light vehicles. Should heavies or enemy air stick their nose in, that would be when the overwatch air of that new squadron would step in. US Army's Delta Force would do the VIP extraction, and if all went well, they'd be back in time for lunch.

The two pilots had sat through the entire briefing, a process of several hours. Afterwards, they'd headed directly for the dining facility for a late dinner, which they extended out to take another hour. After _that_, they'd made their way to one of the base's recreation facilities, where four more hours had disappeared playing pool, knocking back a few rounds, throwing darts, and generally just wasting time. Neither of them were looking forward to having to live in a TEMPER tent again, and neither were they looking forward to picking through their destroyed rooms to recover anything of personal value; Security Forces and the force support squadron had already gone through and removed anything of military value.

Finally, somewhere close to midnight, they'd gathered their courage and went looking for the tent they would be living in for the rest of this deployment. TEMPER tents—Tent, Expandable, Modular, PERsonnel—were regarded as ancient in the US military, with nearly all of them having been replaced with the far better-designed Deployable Rapid Assembly Shelter (DRASH) tents. TEMPER tents, if one was lucky, had one single attachment point for a heating/air conditioning unit, and nine times out of ten the thing didn't work even if it was attached; the tenth time, the unit that was attached was too small to adequately cool or heat the size of the tent it was attached to. The rain fly on them didn't reach all the way to the ground, which allowed wind to get inside easily and turn the entire structure into a giant, noisy, nerve-wracking sail in anything stronger than a gentle breeze. And unfortunately, given that this base was set up by the local government rather than the US military, the only emergency billeting equipment they had on hand was surplus TEMPER tents.

All-in-all, the experience of living in that tent with a dozen other women, and then the ordeal of using common showers the next morning, reminded Emily far too much of the deployment training she'd done during her tenure at the Air Force Academy. The headscratcher came in with the fact that she used to say she'd enjoyed that training, as it had involved a bit of role-playing and practical application of all the book learning that she'd been enduring. Certainly, in the future, she would think back and recall this deployment before opening her mouth to admit she'd enjoyed that training ever again.

And so, after breakfast and watching the helicopters depart on their mission to rescue James, Emily and Missi had gathered their courage and headed back to the destroyed dormitory to recover any of their personal property that remained.

She picked her way carefully through the mess, stepping over a pile of broken plastic and fabric that had probably been her desk chair, and stood in an empty space before the wreck of her bed. Gingerly reaching out to grab a corner of it, mindful of it still being hot from the fire or having splinters that could stab her, she hauled the half of her bed she had hold of away from the wall with a crash as it turned over and fell away.

This opened up room to reach the other broken half of her bed, which she moved by planting her back against the wall, putting her boot on the twisted frame, and shoving it away. As she had expected, smashed between the bed and the wall, was what was left of her nightstand. She carefully lifted the broken lamp by its shade, pausing a moment to stare at the off-white conical fabric. Smirking, she tossed it aside and returned to her work. Ignoring the alarm clock, or what she assumed had once been an alarm clock, she finally pulled aside a cracked wood panel and found what she was looking for.

It was a photograph, taken the day that she had taken her first solo flight as an officer of the US Air Force. In it, she stood before the F-22A Raptor she'd become one with, still wearing her flight suit. Her mother stood to her left, arms around one another's shoulders, and Missi stood to her right in her airman's battle uniform, their arms likewise around each other's shoulders. Kneeling in front of the three women were Vashiel to Emily's left, square-shouldered, proud, and bearing quite the serious expression. To the right of Vashiel knelt Doctor Upton, a paragon of relaxed pride next to the overly-serious Vashiel. And lastly, sprawled on the ground in front of Vashiel and Doctor Upton was none other than Rumisiel, holding Emily's helmet under his right arm and wearing the cheesiest grin he could have mustered.

Emily smiled faintly at the memory. Her commanding officer at that base had been quite a relaxed individual, and arranged to bend the 'no photography on the flightline' rule in order to allow Emily to have her memory. Of course, the actual photograph had been taken the Saturday following her first solo flight, when no one would be on the flightline, taken by that commander himself, but the story surrounding it was still told as memento of her first solo flight.

It had only taken a little convincing to get her mother and Doctor Upton to put in their appearance. Initially, her mother had been beside herself that Emily wished to be a fighter pilot for the military, but after the young woman pointed out that she would be in possession of a four-year degree—as a start—and a well-paying job, her mother had relented, and it hadn't taken long for the pride of a parent whose child was making a success of her life to return. And as for Doctor Upton, well, she was still sometimes surprised that she and Missi maintained a close friendship with the man. It had been awkward at first, after his daughter had simply disappeared, but things had relaxed eventually over the years, mostly due to the contact with the angelic brothers, but Emily now viewed Doctor Upton as a surrogate father figure.

Staring down at the slightly-bent photograph in her hands, protected by the broken frame she had pulled it from, Emily bit her lip as she pondered that there was only one person missing from that memorable day. She could almost see the corrected photo; instead of one arm around her mother and one around Missi, she would have both tightly holding the orange-haired woman wearing a Ford racing jacket, and the woman's arms around her. She would have had to work very hard to refrain from kissing her, though—especially in front of her commander—as Don't Ask/Don't Tell hadn't been repealed yet at the time the photograph was taken.

Not for the first time, she found herself wondering why the racer had just taken off into the blue like that. Rumisiel had mentioned trying to cheer her up the evening of the fight, but only managing to anger her further. The next morning, she was just gone. At first, Emily had thought little of it, that it was only an extension of the vow not to associate with either her or Missi until the two stopped fighting. But then one day became two, then three, and a full week had passed with no sign of the orange-haired racer.

Hellbent on apologizing for her behavior, even having it in her mind to beg for forgiveness if it came down to it, Emily had gone to her friend's house to find Doctor Upton and Vashiel beside themselves, and Rumisiel crushed by a guilt he did not wholly deserve. They had explained that the girl she had come to see had run away, leaving behind a demand not to be followed and an unspoken bitterness toward two friends who wouldn't stop fighting over her. Horrified and numb, Emily had returned home and shared the news with Missi, who reacted with the hysteria that she was in too much pain to muster.

It wasn't long after that night that Emily had faced herself down before her bedroom mirror, unwilling to move for any reason until she mustered the courage to admit aloud what she had secretly always known: that she was in love with the girl who had been a boy. It was a hollow victory, without the person she needed to confess to in her life anymore, but she still counted it as a victory for being able to admit it at all.

Missi had come to visit her that night, and they officially buried the hatchet over the course of several hours, most of which had been spent recalling the fond memories of their time with the orange-haired racer. It struck Emily in an odd way, to be talking about their memories that way, as though the girl in question had died. There was no telling what was in store for their missing friend, but knowing that she had left because of them ripped Emily's guts out. She kept this to herself, however, and idled away the time with the Chinese girl until the younger tuner decided to head home for the night.

Left in silence and contemplation, Emily knew she did not want to live in a world where the girl she loved wanted nothing to do with her. Unable to contain her emotions, she composed an exceptionally-organized and thorough memorandum that explained everything: the misfile event and the life she had lost, the way that she had been thrown from everything she knew akin to a planet tossed from its solar orbit, only to be found and caught up by the other individual who had been misfiled, the girl who had been a boy, with whom she had taken every step of their combined identity crises, the girl she had fallen in love with. She confessed her bitter jealousy of Missi, who saw in the orange-haired racer an individual to love and did not hesitate to express it. She told of the argument that had brought all this about, the sense of losing a part of herself when she learned that the girl had walked away forever. She touched briefly on the pain, and how she wanted it all to end. Lastly, she delivered her requests and final notations.

For her mother, to blame no one for what had happened, for what was to come. She, Emily, was the older one, and she should have been more mature. For Doctor Upton, to not hold his daughter responsible; the only thing she had been at fault for was being an individual who was so easy to love, and that was something one could not truly be blamed for. She also thanked him for his kindness to her, and expressed her wish that he be supportive and understanding of his daughter and her situation, should she return. To Missi, she asked only that the girl continue to live her life to her own desires, and let no one stand in the way of what she wanted. She begged forgiveness for having been so petty, for clinging with such tenacity to a prize she had not claimed, and for causing this entire chain of events. For Vashiel, she lauded his honor and courage, and his benevolence at having assisted them so over the short months she had known him; her only request that he continue to protect and guide his brother in faith.

She pondered for some time on what to say to Rumisiel. He was the original architect of the chaos that her life had become, and she briefly contemplated condemning his past mistakes that had led to the misfile. But those mistakes had also led her to Ash Upton, had led to their lives becoming irrevocably intertwined. Finally, she settled on thanking him for bringing them together, revoking any right for him to try to blame himself for what had happened, and asked that he continue to work toward finding a resolution for the misfile, because Ash deserved to be happy, no matter what that outcome would be.

Lastly, she apologized to her mother, Doctor Upton, Missi, the angelic brothers, and most of all, to Ash for not having the strength to see herself through this. She ended the note, which by now had become several pages, with those three little words to the orange-haired racer, and a simple request that she find happiness in her life, whatever form that took for her.

Finished with her note, Emily had attempted to read it once over to ensure that there were no spelling or grammatical errors, but could no longer make out the words through her tears. Judging it to be as good as it was going to get, she stacked the papers neatly at the end of her bed and reached up her right hand, tugging her hair band free and leaving it beside the papers.

Pressing her hand to her mouth to keep herself from openly-sobbing and catching her mother's attention, she had walked into her bathroom and turned on the faucets, holding her hand under the running water until she judged it to be suitably warm enough. Then she plugged the drain to let the tub fill and stepped back into her bedroom, taking one last look around. Everything was in order, with no mess for her mother to have to worry about. Her room was neat. Organized. Perfect. Sighing, she turned back to the bathroom.

The tub was half-full by now, and so she stripped down completely, taking the time to fold her clothes neatly and place them in order on the lowered toilet seat the same way she would if she planned to get out of this bath: jeans first, then shirt, then bra, then panties. Idly, she figured that whatever police investigators and coroners would be out would think that she wasn't completely there in the head to be so hellbent on perfection, even in death. That was okay; she _wasn't_ all there anymore. Her vanity mirror granted her a box of straight razor blades, not that she had ever used them before now. She selected one from the box and removed its paper covering, tossing that away and returning the box to the vanity.

Turning off the faucets in the tub at three-quarters full, she silently slipped into the comforting warmth of the water with nary a ripple. Closing her eyes as she rested her head against the cool porcelain, she imagined that she was being held in the strong arms of the orange-haired racer. After several moments of this fancy, she determined that there was no better illusion to take to her grave with her. Taking the razor blade in her right hand, she lifted her left arm and turned her palm up toward her, staring for a few moments at the underside of her wrist.

_Down the street, not across..._ she had thought to herself, that morbid turn of phrase on the proper way to commit suicide popping into her memory as she pressed the tip of the blade into her skin. A white lance of pain shot through her as the steel broke flesh, and the sight of the crimson arterial blood beginning to drip out gripped her with momentary panic.

Shutting her eyes, she had slowly pulled the blade toward her body, the white heat of the pain lighting up her nerve endings, but before a second had passed, endorphins flooded her body, taking the edge of the pain off. Judging that she had opened a long-enough cut, she lifted the blade and forced herself to stare at her handiwork. The cut ran from just above her wrist to halfway up her forearm, steadily streaming blood into the bath. A wave of drowsiness attacked her, but she was not finished yet. Switching hands, she repeated the process on her right arm, but this time there was almost no pain.

Finished with the razor blade, she maneuvered her left hand to hang over the edge of the tub, mindful not to drip any blood onto the floor, and tossed the blade over the side. She had wanted to stack it on top of her clothes; its haphazard location on the floor messing with the envisioned tidiness of the scene in her mind, but she couldn't find reason to care anymore.

To her amusement, she could feel her heart rate begin to slow as she became ever more drowsy. It was a struggle to keep her eyes open, and she couldn't figure out for the life of her why she still wanted to. Ash was holding onto her, tightly, whispering promises into her ear to never let her go. She smiled faintly, curling her arms around herself, resting them on the imagined arms of her phantom love. "I'm sorry about all the blood..." she had murmured.

It was okay, her dream Ash had told her. It didn't matter. All she had to do was close her eyes and rest, and they would be together forever.

Nodding sluggishly, Emily had closed her eyes and lost consciousness, never hearing Missi's return, the girl proclaiming she had left her jacket behind. She never heard the younger girl scream at seeing her, her mother's arrival, Missi's frantic attempts to revive her as her mother called the paramedics. Never heard her bedroom window shatter as Rumisiel and Vashiel arrived in full angelic splendor, their power the only thing that sustained her life long enough for rescue crews to arrive.

Feeling a distinct sensation of cold, Emily pulled herself from the memory of that terrible night, taking in a deep, gasping breath as she fought to steady herself. She still carried the scars on her arms from that event, a reminder of the depths of despair to which she'd succumbed, a depth she struggled every day to remain out of.

Brushing her thumb over the photograph she had come for, she carefully tucked it into a pocket on her flightsuit and looked about the ruins of her room once more. Whatever was left in there was really no more than personal entertainment, things she could just as easily replace, or already had back home at Joint Base Langley-Eustis. Turning away from the destroyed room, she picked her way back through the rubble, outside and around the broken wall into what had been Missi's room, to see how the younger girl had fared.

Inside, she found the tuner-turned-fighter-pilot sitting on a pile of debris with her back toward the blasted-out wall, her head hanging as she held something close to her, her shoulders shaking in silent sobs.

"Missi?" she called out, letting her friend and wingman hear her voice before the crunch of debris as she made her way over to her, informing the younger woman it was her and not some random passer-by she'd have to shore up her tough-girl reputation in front of.

The Chinese-American turned her head partially, looking at Emily out of one eye before turning her head forward again. In that brief moment, she caught sight of the glistening tears rolling down her friend's face in a reflection of the light from outside. Immediately, she stepped across the debris on the floor and sat down beside Missi, her right arm going around the younger woman's shoulder and pulling her against her. "What is it, Missi?" she asked quietly. "What's wrong?"

Slowly, she lowered her arms, showing what had once been an ornate and lovingly-maintained scrapbook, now half-destroyed and with the remainder badly burnt by the fires that had come through the room in the wake of the missile attack. "I kept pictures and other stuff from high school..." she explained, her voice hitching as she spoke. "On days when I start to forget Ash's face, or when I've just had a really bad day, I always came back and looked at all this old stuff that made me feel better. But it's...it's all gone now..."

Emily bit her lip and wrapped her arms around the younger woman, holding her close as she turned and gripped Emily's flight jacket, sobbing silently into her chest. Closing her eyes, she just held Missi so she could let it all out. The poor girl may have come to terms with the fact that she would have lost the war for the racer's heart in the long run, that didn't do anything to diminish her own feelings for her, and so Emily knew that losing that scrapbook had to be particularly painful. Shifting her hand to gently rub it up and down Missi's back in a comforting gesture, she softly began to hum a tune she didn't know the words to that she had often heard Missi hum at random moments. All she knew of the tune, aside from a few opening bars, was that it was supposedly an anti-war song, according to Missi.

Hearing the tune, Missi's sobs petered out a few moments later and she let out a chuckle, sniffling once as she leaned out of Emily's hug and gave her squad leader a warm smile. Reaching up a free hand, she wiped the tears away from her eyes and cheeks, then ran it beneath her nose to make sure she wasn't making a mess of herself. "You see?" she asked. "Like I said, you're always watching out for me."

Emily smiled faintly, taking a moment to carefully observe Missi's eyes and body posture to ensure that she was, at least, a little cheered, then reached out and ruffled the younger woman's short hair. "Well, I have to, you know. You're the little sister I never had."

"Sure have made your life hell like one, haven't I?" Missi asked, a grin that trembled only a little appearing on her face.

"You most certainly have," the older woman replied, lightly shoving her shoulder before standing up and offering her hand to help her friend stand. "But you also were there for me when I would have died otherwise, and you've been there to help me stand, or picked me up when I couldn't stand on my own, when I needed it the most. So you really are my little sister in my eyes, and I love you like one."

Coloring nicely at the frank and earnest words of respect and admiration, Missi looked away nervously, then met Emily's eyes. "Thanks," she said. "You really don't know how much that means to me, what with my parents always giving Tom all the attention. That's probably why I latched to Ash as hard as I did, because she gave me attention." She grinned and nudged Emily with her shoulder. "And why I'm latched to _you_, too. I'm just a little attention whore." Her continued smirk, and the playful poking out of her tongue removed any serious jab at herself from the statement.

"You definitely are, at that," Emily answered solemnly, nodding her head with a straight face. "But your heart's in the right place. That's what's important."

Above the normal daily noise levels of the base and the wind coming in from the desert, a new sound pricked Emily's ears. She tilted her head marginally to one side, though she doubted whether that actually did anything to improve her hearing. Waiting patiently, however, did improve the quality of what she was hearing, and now she knew what she was listening to.

"What is it?" Missi asked, an eyebrow raised at how Emily had cocked her head.

"Rotors," the older woman answered. "Helos. D-Ray and Nomad must be back. Let's go see how they fared."

* * *

_Mission Return Parking Ramp, Flightline  
__1106 hours, local time_

By the time that Emily and Missi arrived at the helicopter parking ramp, the crews were already well into their post-flight checks, the rotors slowly rotating toward the end of their power-down sequence. A medical crew was preparing a gurney at the side of one of the spinning-down Black Hawks, with Logan and Doug Robinson, US Army captain and leader of the Apache Shooter Squadron, lingering out of the medics' way.

The medics were loading James on the gurney just as the two women arrived, Emily putting a hand on the side of the support pole and walking alongside as he was wheeled toward the waiting ambulance. "You alright, Major?" she asked, defaulting to a neutral formality tone rather than try to navigate the minefield of reminding him that they had a mutual acquaintance in a certain orange-haired former racer.

"All things considered..." James groaned, wincing from the harsh desert sunlight now shining directly onto his face.

"There was another one of those explosions," Doug said from the other side of the gurney, rubbing the back of his neck to stretch out sore muscles. "And they had Russians, and some Americans I think, with them. Advisers, maybe."

"_Americans_?" Logan asked, flabbergasted.

"That's right," the helicopter pilot answered. "The PJs saw them and exchanged fire. Guys said one of them had a Boston accent, talked like you three do." He made an offhand gesture to Missi, Emily, and Logan.

"We don't have weird accents," Missi deadpanned.

"Not most days, no, but it sure came out when you got plastered last night."

"Up yours."

Wiping away a faint smile before it threatened to bloom at the ongoing friendly rivalry between Missi and the pilot, Emily focused her attention on James. "And Russians. Mercenaries? Could you hear what they were saying?"

Squinting, the former prisoner of war shook his head before closing his eyes. "Just... their voices..." He let out a groan of pain, prompting the medic pushing the gurney by his head to briefly check him, then administer a painkiller.

The four pilots stopped following them at that point, clustering into a little circle to continue their discussion. "The Russian ones were definitely that," Doug noted. "Talking in their language and all. One of my guys knows it. They were saying something about taking trucks down south."

"Better let La Pointe know about this," Emily said.

Missi turned and scanned the area around the flightline. It only took her a moment to locate the general, speaking with an airman before a planning board in one of the hardened aircraft shelters that currently housed an A-10C Thunderbolt II ground attack jet, the undisputed king of close-air support. As she opened her mouth to point this out to her friends and comrades, she was stricken with the strange observation that the ambulance that James was being loaded into fully blocked the fuselage of the A-10 from view, making it seem as though the ambulance had sprouted the trademark long, upswept wings of the flying tank. Shaking her head and grinning at the random thought, she called, "Over there, behind the ambulance."

The quartet walked across the parking ramp, making certain that they exited the controlled area by crossing the white hashed lines rather than 'breaking red,' and approached the hardened shelter. The general's back was to them, and the airman was too engrossed in their conversation to notice the group approach. Emily, highest-ranking in the group, politely called out, "General," to announce their presence.

Both La Pointe and the airman turned to look at them, and the airman excused himself with a nod to the general; saluting on the flightline didn't happen, after all, unless one was the marshaller of an aircraft heading out on a mission. "Colonel?" La Pointe responded.

"D-Ray has a lead on the weapon," she said, taking a step to the side and nodding toward the African American man.

"When we picked up Major Reynolds, one of my men heard several of them speaking in Russian," Doug explained. "Others spoke with Massachusetts-regional accents."

The implications of Russian and American nationals working with their enemies was not lost on La Pointe. His voice betraying his surprise, he asked, "You are sure of this?"

"Sergeant Gwenberg's mother is from St. Petersburg. He speaks Russian fluently," Doug answered immediately. He then pointed to the three racers-turned-pilots around him. "And Colonel McArthur, Major Drake, and Captain Fuller are all from Massachusetts and on occasion slip back into their local accents."

_Well, at least he didn't say that our accents only come out when we're trashed,_ Missi silently mused.

"What did your man hear?" La Pointe asked.

"They were on a radio, taking trucks to a city in the south."

Emily turned to the regional map on the planning board to her left, stabbing a finger at the map. "The only thing down there is Mogadiyu," she pointed out. "Hundred miles southeast, in the mountains."

"Clay City," Doug added, pointing to a satellite photo of the location in question taped near the top of the board. "It's got those old buildings backed into the hills. Plenty of places to hide." Stepping back, he crossed his arms and shook his head slowly; it would be a ground troop's nightmare.

"Should just blast it from orbit," Missi remarked, letting her pastime as a gamer of mostly science fiction action role-playing games show. "Our AMMO guys got a bunch of JASSMs they keep bragging about, saying we can whack things from two hundred miles away. Hell, I bet you we could just roll out onto the tarmac, aim in the general direction, and launch without needing to take off."

Ignoring the physical impossibilities in trying to launch munitions that required a certain clearance from the aircraft before initiating, La Pointe instead remarked, "Those ruins are archaeologically-significant, Captain. We can't just blow them up."

"Yeah, figured not..." Missi murmured, turning and shading her eyes with her hand as she squinted across the flightline.

"We'll have to send in ground troops to check it out," La Pointe continued.

"They'll be shredded in the alleys if the enemy is there," Emily objected, staring at the satellite photos showing the maze of buildings and other obstructions. Behind her, Missi nudged Logan with her elbow and pointed to something out on the line.

"And we've got to worry about the weapon, too," Doug added.

Emily turned as he said this, observing both Missi and Logan to have their attention elsewhere. She followed their gazes to find that they were both looking at Logan's AC-130, an aircraft that had originally began its life as an unassuming cargo plane before some evil genius somewhere had gotten the brilliant idea to hang several small artillery pieces from the side. Its main armament was a 105mm howitzer, a weapon typically employed to demolish entire grid squares on engagement maps. For targets that didn't require so much punishment, there was also a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 25mm Gatling gun rounded out the armaments for use against soft or fast-moving targets.

"Send the assault teams," Logan remarked suddenly. "My crew will support them in the Spooky. We can avoid the ruins and civilian zones."

"Beats blowing the whole damn place back to the Stone Age, even though it belongs there," Missi added.

"Who are you sending to the Stone Age now, Captain?" Stagleishov asked from behind Missi's shoulder, causing the woman to jump away from him. None of them had noticed the Russian general approach.

"General, we have reports of Russians among the rebels," La Pointe began.

"Impossible," Stagleishov cut in, almost too quickly.

"Major Reynolds heard them speaking too, sir," Logan innocently pointed out.

"Major Reynolds must have been confused," the older man suggested, staring down his nose at the American pilot.

Mentally rolling his eyes, La Pointe asked Emily, "What do you think, Colonel McArthur?" Half of the reason he asked was because he knew Stagleishov to be a traditionalist, a hardliner who had trouble accepting the fact that women could be of any value in the military.

"Major Drake's plan is tactically sound," she answered, having keyed in on the reason behind La Pointe directly asking her, and managing to suppress a smile at the old man's stealth jab at the Russian. "We'll fly cover in the event of enemy air intervention."

"Our planes will not attack these ruins," Stagleishov grumbled. "This will be an international outrage."

Despite the rank disparity, Emily felt her proverbial gander rise at the Russian's swift dismissal of her input. Staring him directly in the eye, she responded, "We can do this with or without the MiGs." Very slowly, she turned her gaze back toward La Pointe. "Your call, general."

Fighting to keep down a smirk himself, the Frenchman merely nodded in acquiescence of their strategy. Outraged, but managing to maintain his dignity, Stagleishov turned and stormed off.

Missi waited until she couldn't hear his footsteps anymore, then turned to look over her shoulder and snickered at his disappearing backside. "Guess that's without."

* * *

_F-16C Fighting Falcon, Tail Number 841, Callsign "Misfile Two"  
__Mogadiyu Operations Area, Eastern Africa  
__1307 hours, local time_

The computer in Missi's jet sounded a solid tone as the two target boxes in her heads-up display burned red, the word 'LOCK' at the bottom of her screen. Without any order having to be given, she launched her two AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles in perfect harmony with the other three members of the flight, each of the eight missiles targeting either a radar array or a surface-to-air missile battery. Arcing away from the path of the missiles, she followed in Emily's wake as the older woman separated from Three and Four, gaining altitude to set up a high-altitude combat air patrol orbit. As they climbed, the words 'TARGET DESTROYED' flashed on her HUD.

"_SAMs destroyed,"_ Emily reported over the battlenet. _"Shooter, Nomad, and Razor, cleared to enter the combat zone. Misfile is on patrol and have you covered."_

"_Thanks for the help, Misfile,"_ Logan responded. _"We're zero-two from the combat zone and are moving to clear the landing zone. Nomad, we'll have the place cleaned up and ready for you in a few."_

Now on station at 30,000 feet, the coverage of their radar greatly improved. Scanning the surroundings, Missi took note of several unaccounted-for blips on her radar. Glancing up to make sure she was still in place behind and to the right of Emily, she focused her attention on the radar to sort out what those contacts were.

"Lead, I've got a couple hits to the north," she announced over the short-band frequency used by their flight. "Can't be sure from this distance, but it looks like a civilian and some MiGs."

"_Thanks for the heads-up,"_ Emily responded. _"I've got 'em too, now."_ There was a brief pause as she switched over to the general battlenet. _"Razor, this is Misfile One. Airspace over Clay City is secure. We're reading a civilian flight being harassed by two jets up north. Two and I are going to assist. Three and Four will remain here to keep cover."_

"_Copy, Misfile. Good hunting."_

"_Holler if you need us,"_ Emily said, then switched back to the flight frequency. _"Let's go, Two. Shouldn't be difficult."_

"On your six," Missi responded, effortlessly matching Emily's arc around to the north and boosting her throttle to stay in her hindquarters. She took the opportunity to run a systems check of her weapons and fuel; she had plenty of both to go slap these rebels in the face, then come back and continue the combat air patrol in case the enemy got disgruntled about the AC-130's presence.

"_Shooter One to Razor."_

"_This is Razor-Zero-One. Go ahead, Shooter."_

"_We're en route to the DZ. Is the area secure?"_

"_We're working on it, D-Ray."_

"_Listen, you know we're going to have to pull the plug if the drop zone isn't clear."_

Raising an eyebrow behind her visor, Missi looked up into one of the mirrors mounted to the frame of the canopy, watching fire and smoke belch from a nigh-invisible point in the sky behind them that was the flying artillery platform. Just how much more did they need to do to clear out the landing zone for the helicopters?

"_I know. We're working as fast as we can."_

"Maybe this was a bogus idea..." she murmured.

"_Nothing we can do about it now,"_ Emily responded. _"We've already committed."_

"Yeah."

"_Eyes open, we're coming up to engagement range on those bandits,"_ her flight leader said.

Shifting in her seat, Missi flipped her weapons over to Sidewinder control and watched the range numbers scroll down on the target boxes her HUD drew over the enemy planes. They had a twenty-two mile maximum range engagement for the Sidewinders that was rapidly ticking down.

Ahead, the two enemy aircraft were buzzing a commercial civilian airliner, apparently attempting to force them to land somewhere so they could be taken as hostages. The captain of the airliner was demonstrating considerable courage by not complying with them and continuing to move to avoid being forced down to wherever the enemy wanted them to go.

"Warning first or just blow them out of the sky?" she asked.

"_We need to get them away from that airliner so it isn't damaged when we take them down. Try to spook them away from it."_

"Copy."

Jockeying her stick to the right, she separated slightly from Emily, picking the rightmost of the two MiG-21s for herself. As the range dropped below twenty-two miles, she painted the jet with a missile lock, but held off on firing. Far away, the enemy fighter reacted immediately, rolling onto its back and diving toward the ground. In a closer-range engagement, that would have broken the target lock Missi had on him, but all she had to do was dive in a shallow angle to allow her computer to upgrade the target lock to an optimal one. The 'SHOOT' box flashed in her HUD, and she triggered a missile, watching as the smoke plume shot from beneath her wing and arced into the path of the enemy MiG's dive.

Pulling back out of her shallow dive, she located Emily's fighter above her as a flash of light drew her attention toward the airliner. The flash had been the explosion of the other MiG, its debris raining down toward the desert below. She barely even blinked as her HUD displayed its target destroyed message, guiding her jet to take the matching position off the airliner's right wing as Emily pulled in on its left.

"_Civilian airliner, this is Colonel Emily McArthur of the United States Air Force. What's your status?"_

"_Thank you for the help, Colonel McArthur,"_ the airliner's pilot replied. Missi couldn't pick out his nationality based on accent; the radio transmission obscured too much. _"I'm almost certain those MiG pilots wanted us to land to take us hostage."_

"_Too bad for them we were around,"_ Emily said. _"We'll escort you for now, but we're limited by other operations in this area."_

"_You've already destroyed the rebels, Colonel. Anything else at this point I would consider above and beyond, and we are in your debt."_

"_Happy to be of service, Captain."_

Easily maintaining her position beside the civilian plane, Missi scanned her side for any damages. Aside from the grime of daily use, there was no sign that the enemy had attacked the plane. As she scanned the aircraft, she saw a child staring out at her aircraft in awe and waved at the child. Grinning widely, the child waved back.

Unable to stop herself from smiling as well, she leaned back against her seat and ran another systems check, then started to hum _The Journey Home_, the song that Emily had used earlier in the day to calm her down. Unbeknownst to her, she had apparently been patched into the frequency Emily was communicating with the airliner on, and had been transmitting, as suddenly the pilot remarked, _"That's a nice tune, pilot. Not one you hear often from a fighter pilot."_

Grinning under her oxygen mask, she replied, "I'm a proponent of peace through superior firepower, but even I recognize that war isn't always the answer."

"_You see?"_ the pilot said, apparently to his copilot. _"I told you Americans are good people. They just are a frank and straight-forward people."_

On her radar, Missi could see Emily's jet begin to slow, and reduced her speed to match. _"Sorry to have to send you off on your own, Captain, but we have to return to our operations to the south,"_ the older woman transmitted.

"_It is no problem, Colonel McArthur. Your assistance has been most appreciated. Good luck in your objectives, Colonel, and take care of your wingman, Edge, there."_

It took all of Missi's willpower not to laugh aloud, especially knowing how confused Emily would be at the last half of that statement. _"Will do, Captain. Good luck to you as well."_

Now well behind the airliner, Emily banked onto her right wing and began a slow curve back toward the south. Missi rolled to her left wing and mirrored the movement, winding up back behind and to Emily's right as the two jets headed back to support their mission in progress.

"So, since he called me Edge, does that mean I get to adopt it as my official callsign now?" Missi asked with a grin once she'd switched back to the flight's frequency.

"_What was he talking about?"_

"It's a game reference."

"_Well, you can use it if you want, I guess."_

"Yesss..." Missi hissed, clenching a fist. "Thanks, boss."

"_Spence, nail those planes before they take off,"_ they heard Logan order over the battlenet. _"Misfile is working up north. We'll deal with this ourselves."_

"Shit, sounds like that air base we pegged near the ruins decided to wake up and join the party," Missi remarked. "I hope Logan's gunners are on their game; we aren't going to get back there in time."

"_Misfile One to Razor."_

"_Go ahead, Misfile One."_

"_MiGs?"_

"_Everything's under control, Misfile. We got them before they took off."_

"_Good work, Logan."_

Grinning, Missi transmitted, "Hey, break out the champagne. Ooh! Better yet, I'll see if I can swipe some of General Stag's vodka."

"_You do that,"_ Logan chuckled.

"Man, I'd hate to be at that base now. Logan and his boys are probably taking it apart bit by bit."

"_Good thing, too. That'll lighten the pressure the enemy's been putting on us in the air."_

"_Razor to Shooter One. Bravo Eight is setting charges. They have casualties."_

"_Roger that. Secure the LZ before Nomad arrives."_

"_Roger."_

Listening to the radio chatter with half her attention, Missi focused on watching the skies and the radar. At least now they were coming back toward the fight, and she had a head-on view of the AC-130 flying in slow, easy circles around the enemy air base, which was mostly obscured by dozens of columns of thick, black smoke. As they drew closer, the ungainly-looking aircraft banked away and hooked over the mountain, presenting its left side—and its formidable arsenal—to what seemed to be a back exit that the helicopters were moving toward.

"_Bravo Eight is at LZ,"_ the Delta Force team reported.

"_Roger that, we see you,"_ Nomad Six-One responded. _"LZ is hot. Repeat, LZ is hot."_

"_Incoming SAM,"_ Nomad Six-Two warned. _"Evade! Evade"_

"_Nomad Six-One, abort!"_ Doug ordered. _"Turn off!"_

A bright flash amidst the ongoing display of fireworks from the AC-130 marked a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile striking one of the helicopters. Missi grimaced, but knew she was impotent. Neither she nor the rest of her flight were equipped to engage ground targets.

"_We're hit!"_ the pained cry of Six-One came, backed by the noise of cockpit alarms.

"_Jack, take out that ground position!"_ Doug ordered his gunner.

Before the helicopter's gunner could strike, a 40mm round from the AC-130 fell into the mobile battery, mercilessly and efficiently eradicating the offending enemies. _"Nomad Six-One, say your status,"_ Logan demanded.

"_We're shot up,"_ the helicopter pilot answered. _"Losing oil pressure. I have to bug out."_

"_Nomad Six-One, can you get back home?"_ Doug queried.

"_Unknown, but I'm giving it a shot, Cap."_

"_Don't wait around, then. Nomad Squadron, Six-One is out of the game. Pick up the slack. Ground forces have shoulder-mounted RPGs and launchers. Be careful."_

"_Six-Two, roger."_

"_Alright people, let's do whatever it takes. Everyone aboard those helicopters."_

Rocking gently back and forth in her seat, Missi looked up and ahead at Emily's F-16C. The older woman was silent, but she knew that not being able to help had to be eating her alive as much, if not moreso, than it was her. But they both knew that protecting the ground forces was what Logan and the AC-130 were for. They were there in case enemy air showed up. Or rather, as Logan's crew had already demonstrated, in case enemy air showed up that the gunners didn't beat them to.

"_Shooter, we're taking heavy fire,"_ the Delta team reported.

"_There are too many targets down here for us to clear,"_ Logan radioed. _"Those helicopters are getting pounded."_

"_Black Hawks, pull out,"_ Doug ordered. _"Dammit, take off!"_

"_Shooter, be advised,"_ Six-Two replied, a little hesitantly._ "Lieutenant Nicholas is still on the ground. He went back to look for one of his men."_

"_God damn it!"_ Doug swore.

"_What do you want us to do, Captain?"_

"_Get the hell back to the holding area."_

"_You want us to leave him?"_

"_I can't risk the entire operation for two guys. We'll suppress fire here first."_

And boy, were they. The delays coming from the AC-130 crews amounted to however long it took enemy forces to show their faces to the sensor operators onboard the gunnery platform. Once located and coordinates given, it wasn't even seconds before they were instantly obliterated by whatever force was necessary. And the gunnery crew had demonstrated that they weren't above spending the 105mm cannon on targets that they could have gotten with the 40.

"_I don't have much fuel,"_ Six-Two answered as the helicopter rose and pulled away from the exfiltration point. _"I can only hold for five, maybe ten minutes."_

"_Shit."_

"_I have an idea, D-Ray,"_ Logan announced.

"_Go ahead."_

"_We can use the Fulton recovery system."_

"_You're going to use the sling? The guy on the ground can handle it, right?"_

"_I wouldn't suggest it if I didn't think we could do it."_

"The Fulton system..." Missi mused. "Wait, isn't that what Batman used to get out of Hong Kong in _The Dark Knight_?"

"_Yes,"_ Emily answered, her attention clearly on the action down below.

"_Stand by,"_ Doug responded to Logan. _"Nomad, how many people are still on the ground?"_

"_Bad news, Captain,"_ Six-Two responded. _"The guy he went back for is dead. It's him and the body."_

"_Shit. Okay, Razor, set it up."_

"_Bravo Eight-One, do you read me?"_

"_I read you, Razor."_

"_We're going to make a pass and drop the gear to you, then come around to pick you up."_

"_Copy that, Razor. I'm getting the hell out of this trench."_

From high above, Missi had a general idea of where the stranded man was by way of the movement of Doug's AH-64D Longbow; the helicopter stayed close to protect the infantryman from immediate threats, leaving the AC-130 crew to eradicate everything farther away. She could see tracer fire and handfuls of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles rising from the ruins to try and take out Logan's aircraft. To his credit, he never once took an evasive maneuver that would take his crew off-target, deploying dozens of flares in the trademark 'angel wing' pattern to ward off the missiles.

As she watched, the ungainly aircraft banked sharply, moving to pass directly over the special forces soldier on the ground. The rear loading bay of the aircraft opened, but she couldn't see the recovery sling thrown from the back. Unperturbed by the ground fire now beginning to hit their armored flank, the AC-130 continued on before beginning a wide circle to head back and pick up the downed man.

"_There it is,"_ Emily announced. _"The balloon's up."_

It took the flicker of lights moving up the line and into the floating balloon for Missi to spot the thing, surprised that for once Emily had seen something before she had. Logan had to have keyed in on it as well, the AC-130 banking toward it as the two prongs mounted to the nose of the aircraft swung forward into a V-shape to catch the balloon.

"_Stand by, Bravo Eight,"_ Logan advised. _"And hold on tight."_

The two pilots watched, breathless, as the propeller plane descended below one thousand feet, bouncing back and forth as it became susceptible to the wind coming down off the mountain. This not only hampered Logan's piloting, but the targeting of the gunnery crew as well, causing no small number of shots to miss their mark. Anti-aircraft artillery fire hammered the sides of the plane, but their armor held for the most part.

A sudden crosswind slammed into the right side of the plane, driving it off-course while tugging the balloon away from them. _"Shit!"_ Logan swore, lightening the arc of his turn to allow his gunners to get better fields of view on the targets in the area.

"_Razor, say your status,"_ Emily radioed.

"_Attempting recovery,"_ the curt reply came. _"Man stuck on the ground."_

"_We know. We're closing in."_

"_I can handle this, Emily."_

"_Okay. But if the fire gets too heavy, break off and we'll do what we can to thin them out for you."_

"_Thanks, Colonel. We'll make one more pass before letting you have it."_

"I could use some practice at ground strafing," Missi commented sarcastically.

"_We'll use the nines if we have to,"_ Emily responded. _"They can hit ground targets and nothing I'm seeing down there is particularly heavily-armored."_

"Well, let's see what Logan's got," Missi said, shifting in her seat to get a better view. "He's coming out of his turn... Oh damn, he's going in like his ass is on fire. You crazy son of a..."

By now, the AC-130 was less than six hundred feet off the ground, the criminally-low altitude making it seem like it was going much faster than it actually was. The gunners were still trying to hit targets, but it was a hopeless gesture at this point, their fire going well wide of their actual targets. Just when it seemed that Logan was intent on pancaking the desert, the AC-130's nose came up, and Logan triumphantly announced, _"Balloon snagged!"_

Emily and Missi didn't release their breaths. This was the most dangerous part of the recovery, attempting to regain altitude and get clear of the ground fire. Logan immediately broke to the right, back toward the direction of previously-cleared ground, as the rest of his crew set about bringing their package on-board. Down below, Doug gave the most persistent anti-aircraft guns a strafing run for their troubles.

"_Do you have him, Razor?"_ Emily finally queried.

"_That's affirmative, Misfile One,"_ Logan answered, relief evident in his voice. _"Bravo Eight-One is aboard, and we are returning to base."_

"_Good job, Razor."_

"_Thanks."_

Relaxing as much as her restraints would allow, Missi, let out her breath in one long sigh, then followed in Emily's wake as the older woman turned to escort the AC-130 back to their base. Despite having seen very little action in this mission, Missi still felt good about it. They'd accomplished the mission, come back with few casualties, protected a civilian flight, and stuck it to Stagleishov in the process. Unclipping her oxygen mask from the right side of her helmet, she let it hang by the left-side straps and began to whistle the same tune from before.

All-in-all, this was shaping up to be a pretty fine day.


	4. Blue on Blue

_November 21, 2020  
__F-16C Fighting Falcon, Tail Number 004, Callsign "Misfile One"  
__Expeditionary NATO Airfield, Eastern Africa  
__1548 hours, local time_

"Misfile One to Tower," Emily radioed as her flight approached the base. "Requesting permission to land."

"_Misfile One, you're cleared to land,"_ Kingmaster came back.

On radar and around her, the other three F-16s of her flight broke in a gentle arc to the left to wait in the queue for their turn to land. Emily continued on ahead, nosing down toward the runway as she deployed her landing gear and lowered the flaps on her wings to ensure that she maintained enough lift to remain in the air even as she slowed down for landing approach.

"Misfile One, gear down, full stop. Making final approach. Altitude two thousand, speed three-two-three."

"_There are fighters on the runway,"_ Missi reported.

Emily looked up from her instruments, spotting a group of MiG-29A Fulcrums moving into launch position at the far end of the runway. She frowned, tightening her grip on the stick, making ready to abort her landing run if necessary. It was sloppy and a clear safety violation—even one the Russians would be mindful of—to have fighters launching while another was trying to land.

"Tower, what's up with the planes coming to the runway?" she queried. Silence met her call as the MiGs began to cruise down the runway, clearly intent on launching without clearance, and coming right for her. "Tower, respond."

The first of the MiGs was airborne now, coming straight in her direction. Swearing, she slammed her stick to the right and pulled away, lifting her flaps and gear back to a closed state. The MiG-29 shot past behind her, close enough for its wake to rock her fighter. Eleven others followed after it, and as she arced around to put her nose to them, she watched as they formed up and departed to the southeast.

"_Whoa, shit!"_ Missi exclaimed.

"_What the hell is going on?"_ Three asked.

"_Misfile One, this is Big Bear One,"_ Stagleishov called, clearly piloting the lead MiG-29. _"We had to scramble fast. Sorry for the mix-up."_

"_That was more than a mix-up, Stovie,"_ Missi spat.

"_Very sorry, very sorry."_

"Why the hell didn't you clear your take-off with the tower?" Emily demanded. It was poor protocol to speak so confrontationally to a superior officer, even a foreign one, and she reminded herself she'd have to speak to Missi about it later—and ask what 'Stovie' meant—but she was angry at the moment, and didn't care for the time being. The damn bastard had nearly run her over.

It took her a moment to realize that she hadn't been answered. "Big Bear?"

Still, nothing.

"_Colonel McArthur, we have an emergency here,"_ the control tower reported. The voice was a little deeper than she was used to, but then again, they usually flew in the mornings, and a different shift was probably in the tower now.

"What's happening, Kingmaster?" she asked, arcing back toward the base.

"_Carruth is under heavy assault. We are about to scramble all forces."_

That must have been why Stagleishov was in such a hurry. She was willing to forgive him for nearly killing her, this time at least. Aborting her turn, she turned back to follow in the direction Stagleishov and his MiGs had gone in. "Misfile copies. Two, what's your fuel state?"

"_Enough to get up to Carruth and back,"_ Missi replied.

"Kingmaster, Misfile Flight is heading up to Carruth. Misfile One to all returning allied aircraft. Land if you're low on fuel. All others, follow me."

Glancing down at her fuel gauge, she ran the calculations in her head. She had enough to get to Carruth and dogfight for three or four minutes, but then she'd have to return to refuel and rearm. Missi was doubtless in the same boat, but the other squadrons would have made it by then, and could either finish the job themselves or hold until they returned. Rolling her throttle all the way forward, her airframe hummed around her as the afterburner kicked in.

"_Misfile, this is Lion One. We have just launched and are en route."_

"Bandits ahead," Emily reported, the contacts just popping up on her radar within missile range. "All forces, clear to engage."

"_Christ, it's a rerun of MiG Alley,"_ Missi swore.

Emily rolled onto her left wing and pulled hard into a turn to evade a missile rising up from below at her. These enemies must have gone ahead of the main force to ambush the responding NATO units, using terrain-following flying and the ravines down below to avoid radar detection until they were within missile range.

Her turn brought her into line with the rear of a MiG-21, the enemy either unaware of her or too focused on trying to lock onto Missi. Her computer locked on immediately and she fired a Sidewinder, the missile arcing over the back of the enemy plane and shredding its engine.

"_More bandits are inbound,"_ Lion One reported. _"Kingmaster, we're going to need more help up here."_

"_Try and stay with me,"_ Missi muttered to a jet pursuing her. Emily glanced over just in time to see the younger woman counter-maneuver onto the MiG's tail, eliminating it with a close-range guns attack.

Without wasting time, Emily nosed to the right and locked onto the wingman of the MiG she had just shot down, the speed of her attack denying the enemy the time he needed to react, another missile sending him spiraling out of the sky. "Bandit destroyed," she reported, looking down at her radar and then scanning the skies nearby for her next target.

"_Do not let the rebs fly by you in the weeds,"_ Lion One ordered his men, discreetly warning them about the enemy's tactic of using terrain-following. _"Make them come up."_

Emily closed on her next target, and just as she was lining up for a missile strike, the MiG exploded, courtesy of a long-range strike from one of Lion's Mirages. Chuckling, she tightened her turn, spotting another MiG by its lonesome off to her right. One of the allied pilots warned, _"Misfile One, target is cutting toward you."_

"Roger."

"_Don't worry about your stalker, Boss, I'm on him,"_ Missi said.

She glanced at the rear mirror in her cockpit, then focused on the MiG she was lining up on. This one, for whatever reason, didn't even seem to be trying to evade. Even after she launched her missile, she continued to remain nose-on to him, watching for any sudden tricks or evasive actions. But this enemy just continued straight and level flight, not even attempting to use countermeasures against her missile. Odd. Was that a novice pilot?

She didn't have time to contemplate that further, her computer alerting her of an enemy attempting to seek a lock on her. She looked down at her radar, seeing the enemy in question coming from her right, and so cut hard in that direction, causing him to overshoot and throwing off his sensors. Reversing her direction, she came around behind the offending fighter, stitching his engine with cannon fire. The engine flamed out, and she watched a moment as the enemy began a nose-dive to the desert floor.

"_Misfile Three, bandit closing with you."_

"_Roger."_

Another MiG was passing behind her, not aggressive to her, so she pulled her stick back and sent her F-16 into a climb to pursue it. A long chain of explosions nearby drew her attention for a moment to see a lot of enemy fighters on their final descent; between her flight and Lion's Mirages, these amateur pilots didn't stand a chance. Focusing on the target once more as she drew even with it, she fired a Sidewinder once she had achieved lock. This one at least attempted to break away from the incoming missile, but his moves were too slow. The blast of the missile tore off its wing and sent it flipping sideways through the air.

"_Kingmaster to Misfile One. Say your status."_

"We're engaging the rebels," Emily remarked, turning on instinct as an enemy fighter exploded just ahead of her. "No sign of Big Bear."

"_Contact him. They engaged an element further east and should be coming back in your direction."_

"Big Bear One, what's your situation?" she queried. The radar warning receiver indicated an incoming missile from her left. She punched flares and turned into its arc, not looking back as it overshoot and detonated amongst the flares.

"_We are heading in your direction,"_ was all Stagleishov said.

"Are you engaged with enemy units?"

The silence lasted long enough for her to complete a loop and come from above and ahead at an enemy fighter, sending a missile into its path. As the wreck fell to the ground, Missi reported, _"No answer. What the hell is with them?"_

Looking down at her radar, she could find no more enemy contacts, but the group of MiG-29s from Big Bear were now on her screen. She turned in their direction as they began to spread outward. Missi pulled up behind her right, and a wingpair of Mirage 2000s from Lion were ahead on that same side. The French pilots seemed to be just as concerned with what was going on.

"Big Bear, give me your status," she demanded.

Her answer came from her radar warning receiver, warning of a missile from directly ahead, within the Russian formation. Grimacing, she turned her nose to the ground and dove, leaving flares in her wake. "Missiles, evade!" she ordered the allied pilots. "Mercenary flight, state your intentions!"

As she pulled out of her dive, she watched a MiG-29 coast in on the tail of a Mirage 2000, launching a missile at the allied plane and following it up with cannon fire. The missile impacted with the left rear of the French plane, sending it spinning out of control.

"_What the fuck!"_ Missi spat. _"Two of these bastards have me locked."_

The radio waves overloaded with allied pilots shouting, _"Friendly fire!"_ in an attempt to get the MiGs to stop their attack. "Bear Flight, break off!" Emily ordered.

"_Blue on blue,"_ came Missi's utterly-calm report as she shook the missiles coming after her with flares. _"Blue on blue."_

"General, what the hell is the deal?" Emily growled as she brought her fighter around to locate Stagleishov's MiG-29.

"_He doesn't have the balls to answer,"_ Missi sarcastically responded.

"To hell with him, then. Misfile One to all aircraft. Big Bear Flight is hostile. I say again, MiG-29s are hostile. Burn the bastards out of the sky."

Responding to that command with an enthusiastic shout, Missi immediately dropped her throttle and tucked into an aileron roll, forcing the MiG chasing her to overshoot. Her aircraft still inverted, she hammered its backside with 20mm fire, flaming out the engines. The MiG fell out of the sky, only to explode moments later. _"Dosvedanya, svoloch!"_ she taunted the downed pilot.

"_Where the hell did you learn to say that?"_ Three asked her.

"_Call of Duty,"_ she answered tersely.

"_Misfile One, do you know what's going on?"_ Lion One asked, panic creeping into his voice. _"The mercenaries are attacking us."_

"The bastards turned on us, Lion," Emily answered, cutting into a high-g turn to get behind a MiG chasing after Missi, the acceleration forces crushing her into the right side of her cockpit. "Defend yourselves and take out as many as you can."

"_Uh, roger that, Misfile."_ The confusion was clear in his voice, but the presence of a known threat and target were rapidly making that disappear. _"Missiles in the air. Lion Four, break right."_

The MiG she was chasing was more experienced and had better equipment than the rebels they'd been fighting thus far. Detecting her missile lock, the betrayer pilot rolled onto his left wing and pushed his throttle forward, accelerating into a turn that Emily had some trouble matching. As she struggled to catch up, she glanced at her radar and saw additional contacts, more rebel MiG-21s. One was coming straight at her, attempting to catch her unawares while she was busy trying to keep up with the MiG-29. She swiftly shifted her target lock onto it and fed a missile into its conical intake, rolling right to get clear of the debris cloud.

"_They are not our usual thugs,"_ Lion One remarked. _"Their Fulcrums are a hell of a lot better than the rebel crates."_

That certainly went without saying. A glance into one of her rear mirrors showed another rebel trying to sneak up behind her, but she preempted him by snapping her stick back and feathering the throttle, performing a tight loop that left her on his tail. Wasting no time, she burned his engine out with cannons, then banked to the left to find another target.

"_Lion Four is hit. He is going out."_

Turning back toward the bulk of the engagement, she picked out a MiG-29 and locked on at long range. She fired a Sidewinder at it and accelerated, prepared to dive on it when it evaded her missile. To her pleasure, however, the infrared missile shot straight through the enemy's countermeasures, ignoring them completely, and blasted both engines out of the fire. Smiling in grim satisfaction, she attempted to repeat the process on his wingman, but the enemy plane's orientation to her allowed it to outmaneuver her missile without dumping flares.

"_The damn Stovies have our playbook,"_ Missi grumbled.

"Tear a new page," Emily responded.

She arced after the MiG in her sights, closing in and snapping off a missile. The explosion peppered its left wing and vertical stabilizer with shrapnel, and sparked fire from the left engine. Demonstrating a great amount of experience, the enemy pilot simply shut down that engine and continued on, its maneuverability and speed greatly hampered. Just as Emily moved in for the killshot, her computer toned, _"Missile. Missile."_

Glancing down at her radar, then into a mirror, she broke away from the crippled enemy fighter and throttled up, deploying flares to ward off the missile. As she'd expected, the originating MiG jumped onto her tail, intent on finishing her off at close range. She slowed some, drawing him in closer, and then mimicked Missi's earlier barrel roll maneuver, tightening her finger on the trigger for her cannons as she accelerated again. Before she could fire, tracers from another enemy curved above her canopy.

These pilots were definitely better than the rebels, coordinating into a two-on-one offensive against her. Rather than pull a fancy maneuver, she simply decelerated hard and pulled her stick to the right. The enemy plane, having been coming in toward her at a gentle leftward curve, had to completely alter its attack angle so as not to lose her, and wound up overshooting. Bringing her nose up, she spitted him with a target lock and launched a missile, the Sidewinder's explosion all but cutting the plane in half at the center.

"_Lion Two, you have one on your tail. Break right."_

"_Breaking!"_

"_Misfile, Lion Two is in trouble. I cannot assist from this position."_

"_Lion One, Misfile Three. I'm on Lion Two's pursuer. I'll have him out of trouble in no time."_

"_Thank you. Misfile Three."_

She looked down at her radar screen. The combined fight had downed about half of the traitorous planes and nearly all of the interfering rebels. About five enemy MiG-29s remained, at the cost of four planes from Lion and damage to Misfile Four. "Let's mop this up. Missi?"

"_I got enough left for two or three more."_

"Good enough. Let's take 'em down."

She turned to reunite with Missi and then engage another target, but before she could, a MiG-29 descended onto her tail and filled the sky around her with tracers. Her stick shuddered in her hand; some of the rounds had hit, but her diagnostics showed minimal damage. Watching its movements for a moment, she repeated her 'slow down and turn against its forward motion' trick, firing her cannon up into its underside. The hull of the MiG-29 split like a ripe melon, the flaming aircraft nosing down into an uncontrolled descent.

Looking around her, she watched as Missi chased a MiG-21 down into the ravine to the southwest of the base. A betrayer MiG-29 saw and dove to pursue. Whether or not Missi was aware of her own pursuer didn't matter. Rolling until she was inverted, Emily dove after that fighter, announcing her presence with a missile lock to take its attention off her wingman.

Ahead, Missi nosed her fighter to the right, firing a burst of 20mm into the path the MiG-21 had to take to curve around a bend in the ravine. The rebel fighter was shredded by the cannon fire, and Missi abruptly pulled out of the ravine. Emily fired a burst over the MiG's top to discourage it from pursuing, then repeated the nose-leading maneuver and fired an optimum-lock Sidewinder. The explosion punched the aircraft's nose down and to the right, and the pilot had no time to recover before his jet pancaked into the side of the canyon.

"_Bandit terminated,"_ Missi emphatically reported, cruising up alongside Emily for a moment before splitting off to assist Lion with mopping up the MiG-21s. _"Only a few of them left. You feel that pressure, Stagleishov? That's the clock counting down on your sorry ass. Tick tock, tick tock, Stovie."_

As to be expected, Stagleishov did not respond to Missi's taunts. Returning to the flight altitude of the main combat, Emily spotted two MiG-29s in hot pursuit of Lion One's Mirage, working in tandem to hem the experienced pilot into a killbox. She turned into their wake and locked up the closest enemy, noting with a sadistic smile that he didn't even respond to her lock-on. The red haze had overtaken him; he was too focused, too hungry in his desire to kill Lion One to notice the Grim Reaper coming down on his own neck.

That combat exclusion was a mistake that only his wingman was in a position to learn, watching as the flaming fragments of his comrade's aircraft flew past him, looking back to see the F-16C closing in with a vengeance. In a panic, he cut hard to the right, an instinctive response that Emily saw coming a mile away. She'd already turned the nose of her plane into his flight path, the optimum trajectory locking into place as the 'SHOOT' box appeared in her HUD. With a press of her thumb, the Sidewinder rode out on its contrail, on course for its date with the MiG-29. To the enemy pilot's credit, once he detected the missile launch, he immediately attempted to evade by rolling onto his left wing and turning in the opposite direction, but this was a simple course correction before the missile reached its target, the blast and acceleration forces shearing both wings and the cockpit section free of the fuselage.

"_Nice kills,"_ Three praised.

"_Colonel, I owe you one,"_ Lion One called in.

The last of Big Bear's MiG-29s made a desperate dive into the ravine again, hoping to shake off their vengeful pursuers in the twists and turns. It was a fool's gambit; the smaller and more nimble F-16s would have a much easier time navigating the canyon than the larger MiGs. Misfile Three and Four went about demonstrating this advantage, sticking close to their targets' tails and feeding them a steady diet of high-explosive incendiary. It didn't take long for the two pilots to put the final nail in Big Bear's coffins.

As her pilots continued through the ravine, chasing down the last of the rebel MiG-21s, Emily's radio crackled. _"This is Stagleishov. Can you hear me, Misfile One?"_

Looking down at her consoles, she tracked the source of the signal to find the Russian general, now flying at an altitude where her radar could pick him up. As expected, he was rapidly departing the combat zone. "What the hell is your problem, General?" she demanded.

"_A shame that you are still alive,"_ he responded, ignoring her question. _"A grave mistake on my part."_

"Damn right it is," she snapped back, turning to pursue and putting everything she could into speed. It was hopeless, though; she knew that his fighter just barely edged hers out in maximum speed, and he was too far away to catch up to. "Why have you changed sides, Stagleishov?"

"_How much did they pay you to turn traitor, you son of a bitch?"_ Missi added for good measure.

"_No one paid me, Captain,"_ the general answered, his calm demeanor only serving to rile the excitable Chinese American up that much more. _"This is my doing."_

"_Is Major Reynolds with you?"_

"_Reynolds is a fool. He is lucky is he still in that bed. It will be a pleasure to shoot you down. Especially you, Fuller."_

"_Yeah? Quit running like a bitch and come say it to my face."_

It was then that a new contact rose from near the surface, drawing Emily's attention to her radar screen. Her sensors identified it as a Su-35 Flanker-E, and she paled instantly. The Su-35 was one of Russia's best fighters, said to be a match for even the F-22. She'd never seen them in combat before, not in real combat. The F-16C she was flying would be hopelessly outmatched.

Judging by the return signal on her radar, the enemy aircraft would be within visual range off to her left. She turned to get a glimpse of the enemy. The Su-35 was heading in the opposite direction she was, clearly flying cover for the retreating Stagleishov. Its left side was toward her, allowing her to make out specific identifying marks, and as her brain recognized the pattern her eyes were seeing, her blood froze in her veins.

On the left horizontal stabilizer of the enemy plane, prominently displayed for all to see, was a stylized crown.

"The King..." she muttered, feeling her heart begin to pound in her chest. "You're real... But is it...?"

"_Colonel Manderly,"_ a new voice broke into the channel. It was a male voice, strong, and the radio distortion didn't quite manage to obscure an accent that only another native of Massachusetts would recognize. _"A pleasure to speak directly to you. Even if it is only to say goodbye."_

"_Who the hell is he talking to?"_ Missi wondered. _"Hey, asshole! Get the hell off our channel!"_

"_Ah, Captain Fuller,"_ the man remarked with mirth. _"Your eloquence is still legendary. You sound a bit under the weather, though. Perhaps you should not be flying with laryngitis?"_

As though to underscore that statement, the Su-35 broke and turned in Missi's direction, clearly intent on shooting her out of the sky. Fear paralyzed Emily, coiling in her guts, that nightmare playing before her vision again. Temporarily out of control by its pilot, her F-16 began to drift to the left, its nose dipping slightly. Even if this pilot wasn't who she thought it was—and the male voice was a bit of an indicator there—if it was anything like her dream, she'd be horribly outclassed by him, and she had even been flying a comparable fighter in her dream.

"_Shit, he's on my tail. Fuck off, you bastard!"_

"_Not used to being ahead of me, eh, Captain Fuller?"_ the King taunted with a malicious chuckle.

"_Jesus, what the hell are you on about, you crazy son of a bitch?"_ There was an explosion in the background of Missi's transmission. _"Ah, fuck! I'm hit!"_

"_Don't tell me that's all you have."_

The sound of her closest remaining friend in trouble snapped Emily out of her paralysis. Tightly seizing control of her stick, she angled into a strong and fast turn to catch up to Missi and the King. If she engaged him in this plane, she would probably die, but at least Missi would be able to escape. That was her job as the older sister figure; she had to protect Missi from harm.

"Get your eyes over here," she snarled into the radio, locking onto his Su-35 and sending a Sidewinder his way. "I'm the one you want."

Demonstrating his superb piloting skill, the King dumped flares and evaded the missile without even breaking his pursuit of Missi, but to both pilots' surprise, he willingly broke away from the damaged F-16 a moment later, turning to head in the complete opposite direction. Something in the motion of his fighter told Emily that he had been spooked by her transmission or something about it. She didn't know what it meant, but she did know that it was her opening.

Slamming her throttle forward, she closed the distance with the King and set up another target lock. She fired her cannons to hem him toward her right side, then depressed the missile trigger as her computer reported a successful lock.

He was a long distance away from her, giving him ample time to react. With flares spreading from both sides of the Su-35 like a grim parody of an angel's wings, the King's nose came up, for a moment presenting Emily with a perfect shot at his exposed top surface, but before she could trigger her cannons, the moment had already passed.

Just as in her dream, time slowed to a crawl as the Su-35's tail snapped up into the sky, its nose pointed down directly at her. From here, the King had a perfect angle to hose her with cannon fire, but she knew without knowing that his finger was frozen on the trigger as the two pilots stared at one another, separated by nothing but glass and open air.

And there, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the voice on the radio that told her she would find a man sitting in that cockpit, those shocked green eyes staring down at her were the eyes that haunted her dreams, the eyes of her long-lost racer, the only difference being the passage of sixteen years of time.

"_Em..."_ came the King's voice across the radio, barely a whisper, as the Su-35 fell into line behind her. She could only make it out because she had been specifically listening for it.

She choked, unable to speak or respond, tears blurring her vision. Her horrible nightmare had become a reality right before her eyes.

"_Shit! Evade!"_ barked the masculine voice of the King.

Emily wasn't aware of her danger until an explosion at her rear slammed her forward in her harness. Alarms wailed in her ear, diagnostics warning her of an engine fire and failing hydraulic pressure.

Ash had shot her!

Panic rising in her chest, she fought her stick for control of the plane as she looked back in her mirror. Through the smoke coming from her engine, she could see that the Su-35 was still behind her, still following her closely, but it wasn't firing anymore. Instead, it had moved in even closer, and the head movement of the pilot she could see seemed to be inspecting her aircraft for the full extent of the damages.

Biting her lip from inside her oxygen mask, Emily choked back a sob and reduced speed. Automated damage repair systems in the plane were working to mitigate the damages, and she hoped to god her engine didn't give out; F-16s were disparagingly called 'piloted lawn darts' for a reason. Another glance back showed Ash matching her reduced speed, moving in the same manner she had been trained to do when shadowing a crippled friendly plane. It seemed that Ash had launched that missile in automatic response to a computer lock-on, and given that the explosion was less than what a direct impact from an AA-11 Archer should have produced, it also seemed she had destroyed the missile prematurely when she realized what she had done.

"_Korol, what are you waiting for?"_ Stagleishov demanded. _"Finish her off."_

Emily tensed, waiting for the killshot, but it never came. Instead, she watched in amazement as, one by one, the remaining missiles on the Su-35 fell away, ditched by their pilot. _"I'm unable to comply,"_ the infuriatingly-_wrong_ male voice replied. A very-notable current of anger ran under the pilot's voice. _"I'm running low on fuel and all of my missiles are expended. I'm breaking off."_

Cutting its speed back even further, the Su-35's nose rose relative to Emily before the pilot punched the throttle, completing an Immelmann turn and retreating from the battle. As it departed, Emily's communication console beeped, and she looked down to see a text communication scrolling across her screen:

EM – DID NOT KNOW IT WAS YOU. PLEASE FORGIVE – A

Those simple words broke her shell. Hastily reaching down to switch off her transmitter, she unclipped her oxygen mask and let it dangle from the left side of her helmet, pressing her gloved hand to her mouth only to reduce the volume of her sobs. Her tears flowed hot and freely, soaking into the material of her gloves and between her fingers. For several long seconds, her mind shut down and could not form a coherent thought, jumping tangentially from Ash returning after all these years, to Ash being an enemy, to Ash not having any hard feelings for her; though they were in every direction, they all involved Ash, and she knew that she was incoherently blubbering at the sudden rush of powerful emotions threatening to overwhelm her.

"_Colonel, you have heavy damage,"_ Missi reported, moving in close to her flight leader's stricken aircraft. From their relative positioning, Emily knew that Missi could see her absolutely coming apart at the seams. The younger woman observed for several moments, then turned her attention down to her displays.

Emily's communications panel beeped again, a new message coming in, from Missi this time:

WAS IT HER? YOUR DREAM?

Barely managing to read the five words through her tears, she leaned back and took a deep, shuddering breath before looking out the right side of her canopy, where she could see Missi flying alongside her with concern evident on her face even over the distance. Her lip trembling, she nodded in an exaggerated fashion, guilt stabbing her in the chest when she saw the pain on Missi's face.

"_Boss, are you okay?"_ Three queried, pulling up on her left. _"Are you bailing out?"_

Breathing in deeply again, she reconnected her oxygen mask and forced herself to get back in control. She was still in the air in a crippled plane, still responsible for getting her people down safely. She could disintegrate later. She cleared her throat, flipped her transmitter back on, then answered, "I'm alright. I have control of the plane."

With Four pulling in behind them, the quartet of F-16s banked slowly toward the air field, mindful of any potential catastrophic damage that could yet occur to Emily or Four's plane. As the runway came into sight, Emily slid up her visor and rubbed her hand over her eyes, wiping away the tear tracts. Then she lowered the visor again and started the landing dance once again, hoping that there wouldn't be any more surprises.

"Misfile One to Tower," she called.

There was a brief delay, during which she noticed her stick vibrating in her hand. She glanced back toward her tail; the rudder looked too damaged to function properly. That could be a problem.

"_This is La Pointe,"_ the second-to-last voice she expected to hear answered. _"Our men in the tower were killed, so you've got me. Please state your status."_

"We killed most of the traitors," she answered. "Stagleishov got away. I'm losing oil pressure and have damage to control surfaces. Requesting permission to land."

A flickering light out of the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she looked back to see a small guttering flame on the top surface of her right wing. Excellent. Now her fuel tank was on fire.

"_You are cleared to land."_

As she accelerated to lessen the time remaining in the air, Missi queried, _"General, we had transmissions from the tower earlier that-"_

"_Yes, I know. Our people were killed. Those transmissions must have come from the mercenary planes. Only half the pilots were involved. None of the ground people."_

By then, she had reached the optimum glide path. Saying a quick prayer, she dropped her landing gear and lowered the flaps to lower her airspeed, grimacing at the shudder that worked its way through her plane when the flaps deployed. Gently easing back her throttle, her eyes flickered from the altitude indicator to the looming runway that grew as she descended.

"_Major Reynolds has come out of the hospital and has taken control of the loyalists,"_ La Pointe finshed.

Well, that was at least good to know, that James hadn't turned on them the way Stagleishov had. She put that thought out of her mind for the moment, focusing as the tarmac came up at her. She rocked in her seat as the rear landing gear touched ground, the familiar screech sounding behind her, and she quickly nosed down to get her front gear down as well. With that done, she breathed a slow sigh of relief and pulled her throttle back to zero. The hard part was over.

But then she realized that the screech had not stopped on her right side, meaning that the wheel on that side was not turning and therefore putting excess stress on the airframe. The ominous creaking sound that came from her right wing underscored this assessment.

"Oh, that shouldn't be making that sound..." she murmured.

Without warning, her stomach clenched as the right rear landing gear snapped off, dumping her aircraft onto its nose and wing. An ungodly shriek of metal assaulted her ears as it spun on the tarmac, slowly bleeding out its forward momentum. Holding her stick and throttle in a death grip, she counted as the nose came around in three full rotations before finally coming to a rest pointed in the direction she had originally been going.

As the horrible noise faded out, a shiver ran up her spine in that same way as when someone runs their fingernails down a chalkboard, but she couldn't rest now. There was a strong risk of fire, and the remaining fuel and munitions on her jet exploding. She unhooked her oxygen mask from the cockpit supply and quickly unbuckled her restraints. As she was doing so, the voice of Stagleishov broadcast from her radio and over the air field's Big Voice loudspeakers:

"_Attention, NATO forces. Witness the destruction of Carruth at the hands of our newest weapon. This is not just a boast. Blatnoi cannot be stopped. We will communicate our demands shortly. Let us see how far your arrogance gets you now."_

Ignoring the transmission except to store it in her memory and think about it later, she pulled the canopy release lever and pushed it up and away with her hands, then crawled from beneath the canopy and slid down the side of the jet onto the tarmac. The sudden smell of jet fuel assaulting her nose, she glanced at the broken right wing of the plane before limping away as fast as she could, her legs feeling like jelly from hours in the cockpit, the chance near-death at the hands of Ash, and the crash landing.

She had only made it to the edge of the runway before a blinding flash from her right stole her attention. Automatically, she turned to look at it, and immediately regretted it as the sharp pain of the illumination stabbed into her eyes. Lifting both hands to ward it off, she stared through the gap between her fingers, horror once again seizing her as she recognized the distinctive mushroom-shape of a massive explosion cloud.

The eerie silence of the scene, due to the distance from the blast, allowed her to hear her pulse pounding in her ears, and then the pressure wave and sound caught up with her, the wall of displaced air knocking her from her feet as the noise of the explosion rumbled like a crack of thunder through the hot desert air.

The first thought through her mind was an angry indignation at the unfairness of it all, of finally finding Ash after so many years only to be killed by a nuclear weapon before she could even speak to her. Then her rational mind caught up, knowing that it was unlikely to be a nuclear weapon, given that the sheer candlepower of even the lowest-yield nuclear device would have instantly struck her blind from the illumination. Further, this was the same sort of weapon that had been encountered twice by Doug and Shooter Squadron, and both times the weapon had been nonnuclear.

It was that simple, hard fact that allowed her to remain standing at the edge of the tarmac, against all her instincts screaming for her to run for cover, and watch as the explosive cloud billowed slowly higher into the sky.

"Ash..." she whispered, the very name feeling so unusual, almost hard to pronounce, and yet, so wonderfully familiar, so _right_, on her lips.


End file.
